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End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
“Peter Turchin brings science to history. Some like it and some prefer their history plain. But everyone needs to pay attention to the well-informed, convincing and terrifying analysis in this book.” —Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames
Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.
Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.
The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames
Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.
Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.
The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2023
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March 10, 2024
Prior to Covid I would have told you that Berlin was one of my favorite metropolises anywhere in the norther hemisphere. Experienced as a foreign mit nur ein bisschen worte under my belt, I found the city to be affordable, exciting and tinged by a thin layer of the grime that so famously characterized the electric later years of 20th century NYC.
Casual Berlin stands in contrast to today’s article about the overproduction of elites. Puritanical aristocrats strangling society with their weird obsessions and disinclination to share a slice of the American dream. More than just a nuisance, Peter Turchin argues that the overproduction of elites is the single most influential factor in the breakdown of social order. This is a unique take on things, so how’s about if we investigate further?
-----------
I originally published this review on my Substack The Unhedged Capitalist - check out that article to read this review with images and better formatting...
https://theunhedgedcapitalist.substac...
-----------
Turchin begins by explaining that no matter how much prosperity is achieved, even the most competent countries must inevitably fall on hard times.
Why does a society fall on hard times? Turchin identifies four key drivers.
If we’re going to talk about elites we should probably define the term. The shape of an “elite” changes based on the culture, but within America we might loosely shoehorn him or her as someone with a (advanced) college degree who aspires to work a white collar or managerial job, earn an above average salary and dictate their personal beliefs to the country at large. Said person will harness their paycheck to gain access to such luxuries as Jarlsberg cheese, trendy vacations at approved locations, healthcare and a lease on the latest model BMW.
Half a century ago those creature comforts awaited many college grads since a diploma was relatively rare, but the magic couldn’t last forever. Starting in the 1970s the deal came under pressure as an ever increasing crowd began to chase the same degrees and thereafter the same employment.
The number of degrees exploded but the job openings didn’t increase fast enough to give everyone their shot at the stratosphere of society. By the time 2023 rolls around it’s standard practice for PhDs to pimp themselves out as glorified babysitters for $60k per annum, prodding prurient pupils down the halls of psych & philosophy 101. Hardly the romantic upper class lifestyle that these elite aspirants envisioned when they took out their $100k loans to get a doctorate. As disillusionment festers the frustrated elites take it upon themselves to claw at the upholstery of the society that has betrayed their aspirations.
Turchin argues that frustrated elites are extremely effective at dismantling society’s pillars, but I can’t claim to have completely understood his argument about intraelite competition and the exact way it tears a culture apart. I have ideas, but nothing solid enough to write about so I’ll have to ask for a pass. Instead, let’s move our attention to a topic I did better with: the fiscal methods that our glorious leaders use to disembowel the social contract.
Expanding inequality
Inequality is a common outcome in an elite heavy society, and boy have we got a lot of that going around. America has become the most unequal high income country in the world, where the top 0.1% control 12.8% of the country’s household wealth and the bottom 50% accounts for a paltry 2.4% of household wealth.
Turchin uses the analogy of a “wealth pump.” I didn’t feel any fondness for this phrase initially but it grew on me as I progressed through the book. QE is the most blatant wealth pump, since it benefits assets holders at the expense of the fifty-percent of Americans who aren’t invested in the markets.
- Steve Eisman
But the wealth pump is more complex than just monetary policy from the Fed. America’s GDP was $25.4 trillion in 2022. Imagine that money getting squirted out of a hose. Where is the hose pointed? Turchin argues that as the number of elites grow they enact policies at a local, state and federal level that favor themselves at the expense of the working class. And what do elites have that others don’t? College degrees!
You want to be a CEO, work at a nuclear power plant, become an engineer, manage a factory? Show me your degree! While this might sound natural enough, we should consider that it keeps millions of qualified people out of good positions. The elites use regulation to ensure that the best jobs go to the educationally ordained, much to the impoverishment of the 60% of Americans who don’t have a degree.
The good news is that this standard might be changing. A growing number of Americans understand that the universities have become a place where you get an ideology not an education. Employers are learning too, as they hire supposedly cream of the crop Harvard and Yale grads who turn out to be privileged duds heavy on outrage and light on contribution. I like to imagine a future in which competence tests become the new standard, even if the path to adopting them is treacherous.
If we as a society begin hiring on the basis of competence instead of college “education,” that will be a tremendous step towards diverting the bounty of the wealth pump back towards ordinary Americans. And it can’t happen soon enough…
Conclusions
Although it feels like we’re three steps away from pulpifying each other with hammers and this is a huge deal, Turchin has indexed the annals of history to prove that our time is far from unprecedented. A one to two hundred year cycle of integration and disintegration is to be found in the history of almost any prosperous society, whether the UK, US, Middle East or China.
Not all societies have survived, but despite the bloodshed and bitter hatred the US has historically always managed to pull through. It is my hope that this time is no different, but for that to happen Turchin argues that two things must come to pass.
First, a reduction in elites. This doesn’t have to be as sinister as it sounds. A reduction in elites could mean younger generations going to trade school instead of university, and existing degree holders giving up on San Francisco and moving to Boise to work at an office supply store. OK, stupid example. Maybe you can think of something better but the point is that we need a certain portion of elite aspirants to give up their lofty ideals and join the real world.
Second, the remaining elites must be willing to split the proceeds of the wealth pump. They have to do more than just placate the middle class while ignoring all of their wants and desire. Ideally these changes can happen without a violent overthrow, a scenario I am all for. And Turchin is too, for that matter.
So let us look for ways to survive this End Time, or 4th Turning if you prefer, without losing our minds and one hopes that the America of the 2030s and 40s is a saner and more prosperous place to live.
Casual Berlin stands in contrast to today’s article about the overproduction of elites. Puritanical aristocrats strangling society with their weird obsessions and disinclination to share a slice of the American dream. More than just a nuisance, Peter Turchin argues that the overproduction of elites is the single most influential factor in the breakdown of social order. This is a unique take on things, so how’s about if we investigate further?
-----------
I originally published this review on my Substack The Unhedged Capitalist - check out that article to read this review with images and better formatting...
https://theunhedgedcapitalist.substac...
-----------
All complex human societies organizes as states experience recurrent waves of political instability. The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century.
Turchin begins by explaining that no matter how much prosperity is achieved, even the most competent countries must inevitably fall on hard times.
It turns out that ever since the first complex societies organized as states appeared—roughly five thousand years ago—no matter how successful they might be for a while, eventually they all run into problems. All complex societies go through cycles of alternating stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.
Why does a society fall on hard times? Turchin identifies four key drivers.
Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.
If we’re going to talk about elites we should probably define the term. The shape of an “elite” changes based on the culture, but within America we might loosely shoehorn him or her as someone with a (advanced) college degree who aspires to work a white collar or managerial job, earn an above average salary and dictate their personal beliefs to the country at large. Said person will harness their paycheck to gain access to such luxuries as Jarlsberg cheese, trendy vacations at approved locations, healthcare and a lease on the latest model BMW.
Half a century ago those creature comforts awaited many college grads since a diploma was relatively rare, but the magic couldn’t last forever. Starting in the 1970s the deal came under pressure as an ever increasing crowd began to chase the same degrees and thereafter the same employment.
The number of degrees exploded but the job openings didn’t increase fast enough to give everyone their shot at the stratosphere of society. By the time 2023 rolls around it’s standard practice for PhDs to pimp themselves out as glorified babysitters for $60k per annum, prodding prurient pupils down the halls of psych & philosophy 101. Hardly the romantic upper class lifestyle that these elite aspirants envisioned when they took out their $100k loans to get a doctorate. As disillusionment festers the frustrated elites take it upon themselves to claw at the upholstery of the society that has betrayed their aspirations.
Turchin argues that frustrated elites are extremely effective at dismantling society’s pillars, but I can’t claim to have completely understood his argument about intraelite competition and the exact way it tears a culture apart. I have ideas, but nothing solid enough to write about so I’ll have to ask for a pass. Instead, let’s move our attention to a topic I did better with: the fiscal methods that our glorious leaders use to disembowel the social contract.
Because the most recent period of social and political turbulence in the United States was the 1960s, which were very mild by historical standards, Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in previous precrisis eras similarly didn’t imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.
Expanding inequality
Inequality is a common outcome in an elite heavy society, and boy have we got a lot of that going around. America has become the most unequal high income country in the world, where the top 0.1% control 12.8% of the country’s household wealth and the bottom 50% accounts for a paltry 2.4% of household wealth.
A wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.
Turchin uses the analogy of a “wealth pump.” I didn’t feel any fondness for this phrase initially but it grew on me as I progressed through the book. QE is the most blatant wealth pump, since it benefits assets holders at the expense of the fifty-percent of Americans who aren’t invested in the markets.
QE is no more than monetary policy for rich people.
- Steve Eisman
But the wealth pump is more complex than just monetary policy from the Fed. America’s GDP was $25.4 trillion in 2022. Imagine that money getting squirted out of a hose. Where is the hose pointed? Turchin argues that as the number of elites grow they enact policies at a local, state and federal level that favor themselves at the expense of the working class. And what do elites have that others don’t? College degrees!
You want to be a CEO, work at a nuclear power plant, become an engineer, manage a factory? Show me your degree! While this might sound natural enough, we should consider that it keeps millions of qualified people out of good positions. The elites use regulation to ensure that the best jobs go to the educationally ordained, much to the impoverishment of the 60% of Americans who don’t have a degree.
The good news is that this standard might be changing. A growing number of Americans understand that the universities have become a place where you get an ideology not an education. Employers are learning too, as they hire supposedly cream of the crop Harvard and Yale grads who turn out to be privileged duds heavy on outrage and light on contribution. I like to imagine a future in which competence tests become the new standard, even if the path to adopting them is treacherous.
If we as a society begin hiring on the basis of competence instead of college “education,” that will be a tremendous step towards diverting the bounty of the wealth pump back towards ordinary Americans. And it can’t happen soon enough…
Conclusions
Although it feels like we’re three steps away from pulpifying each other with hammers and this is a huge deal, Turchin has indexed the annals of history to prove that our time is far from unprecedented. A one to two hundred year cycle of integration and disintegration is to be found in the history of almost any prosperous society, whether the UK, US, Middle East or China.
As we examine one case of state breakdown after another, we invariably see that, in each case, the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites—whether they belonged to the antebellum slavocracy, the nobility of the French ancien regime, or the Russian intelligentsia circa 1900—were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.
Not all societies have survived, but despite the bloodshed and bitter hatred the US has historically always managed to pull through. It is my hope that this time is no different, but for that to happen Turchin argues that two things must come to pass.
First, a reduction in elites. This doesn’t have to be as sinister as it sounds. A reduction in elites could mean younger generations going to trade school instead of university, and existing degree holders giving up on San Francisco and moving to Boise to work at an office supply store. OK, stupid example. Maybe you can think of something better but the point is that we need a certain portion of elite aspirants to give up their lofty ideals and join the real world.
Second, the remaining elites must be willing to split the proceeds of the wealth pump. They have to do more than just placate the middle class while ignoring all of their wants and desire. Ideally these changes can happen without a violent overthrow, a scenario I am all for. And Turchin is too, for that matter.
So let us look for ways to survive this End Time, or 4th Turning if you prefer, without losing our minds and one hopes that the America of the 2030s and 40s is a saner and more prosperous place to live.
May 30, 2023
It is fashionable to talk of the 2020s as a time of upset, instability, turmoil, revolution and war, all without any factual basis, just gut feeling. What is really shocking is that science and math show that it is all true. In End Times, Peter Turchin describes how countries come to this point predictably, and how all of it can always be traced to two factors: elite overproduction, and the concomitant immiseration of the 99%. In the regular cycle, the time for overturning everything is now.
This is quite possibly the most important book of the decade, and affects absolutely everyone. It explains precisely where we are and where we’re heading, based on thousands of years of the same cycles. Unfortunately for the USA, this knowledge comes too late.
To make a long, detailed, involved and complex story short, as the rich grow their families, their children want power and money. They take it from the poor, in low wages, low taxes on capital, removal of rights, reductions in aid, and increases in incarceration and fines (the “wealth pump”). They achieve their goals through a direct line to power, bypassing normal channels. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and more numerous, protests begin. They are chaotic, leaderless and without clear goals. They evolve into bloodletting, literal or physical, which ultimately greatly reduces the number of the elite. Basic wages go up as fewer workers survive and are available, and equality reaches a high point.
And the cycle begins again.
The Chinese have seen this cycle endlessly: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” But Turchin can say this definitively because of a giant database called CrisisDB. It goes back thousands of years, through all kinds of societies and nations. And everywhere he researches, it is the overproduction of elites that strains the system. And causes its demise.
It has long been proclaimed that human society, being composed of individual humans, is far too complex for any kind of model to operate consistently and successfully. But the data say that in high level, general sweeps, patterns and waves occur regularly and predictably. The differences make no difference.
With war, the generation of the war cries loudly – Never again! The next generation enjoys some level of peace, but by the third generation, all is forgotten. People are emboldened again, and ready for the “glory” of another war.
So with politics. Equality reigns for a couple of decades, then distortions begin to appear. Larger numbers of people become fabulously rich, and all their circle want to have their say in power. There aren’t enough positions in government or influence for them, so they become frustrated and embittered. The demands of the rich flood the halls of government. They fund radical candidates, arrange for removals and assassinations, and in general, darken the outlook. Laws begin to dramatically favor the rich at everyone else’s cost.
The 99% become outcasts (flyover country, deplorables, welfare queens, poor, homeless). They look back at their parents, who had decent jobs, decent pay and decent households, and wonder how and why all that went away.
This is exactly what Donald Trump tapped into, even though he clearly had no desire to change any of it. His actions enriched the richest, and his plans were to further impoverish the poor, but his words were to Make America Great Again. That appeal rang truer than anything today’s 99% had ever heard, and they bought into it, hook, line and sinker. But Trump was never going to be the solution. He would only speed up the process to disaster.
Wages had been going down since the 1970s. Unions were shoved out of action. Universities became laughably unaffordable. So did housing. Even life expectancy dropped. Child labor laws are being softened to help suppress minimum wages. This is exactly the configuration of pretty much every civil war and revolution: the rich want their power, and the rest want decent conditions. Something has to give. And it is usually the floor, not the ceiling.
That the lot of the 99% has not and will not improve fits totally into Turchin’s research. Unless someone comes to their aid and reduces the glaring inequality, governments will fall, constitutions will be tossed, domestic terrorism will increase, and civil wars will break out. And elites will light the match. In this decade. The Chinese knew it. So did Tsars Alexander II and III. Yet we keep falling into the same trap.
Turchin has been working at this a long time. His team has built a remarkable dataset. It extends to the point of revealing that:
-When societies are in equilibrium, human height is measurably increased. Americans were the tallest in the world in the 1700s. And before a civil war, people don’t grow nearly as tall; they actually, measurably shrink. It is plain for all to see.
-Life expectancy changes as the cycle approaches the chaos stage. He says American life expectancy has never fallen three years in a row since the Great Depression of 1933. But it has just done so. And Covid-19 is far from exceptional. Major epidemics “are often associated” with these periods.
-“Nearly half of the millionaires who thrived during the Roaring Twenties were wiped out by the Great Depression and the following decades, when worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita.” It was the greatest leveling ever seen in the USA.
-“In one-sixth of the (global) cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state –it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.”
-The “CrisisDB confirms that rise-and-fall cycles in societies with polygamous elites are substantially shorter than such cycles in monogamous societies.” In English – nuclear families produce fewer children, delaying the inevitable competition for power.
In other words, the data has a lot more to tell us than we even know to ask. This is a whole new way to look at the world.
It happens the same way all over and throughout history. Turchin examines not just the US, as it approaches this low point right now, but also England at several points, France, Russia, the Roman Empire and China, which has the longest record of it.
The commonalities occur at every stage. When the cycle is fresh and people are equal, they co-operate. The common good is an important value to them. But as the rich grow in numbers and in wealth, and pull away from the pack, “the sense of national cooperation with which states quickly rot from within” takes over, Turchin says. This is as precise a summation of the US today as I have seen. It is shockingly true. People begin to fear and hate institutions. They want to seal the borders to keep what little is left for themselves.
Turchin points out that it is the ruling class that wants open borders. They mean more competition for jobs, so lower wages and more government aid programs they can manage for profit. He cites Bernie Sanders saying open borders is “a Koch idea” and nothing he supports. But the ruling class always gets its way – until the end. It has been decades since voters had any real say in government. Legislators bow to rich donors. Voters only count during elections, not in legislatures. A billionaire has purchased himself a Supreme Court justice. The rot has become glaringly visible.
It is the ruling class that scares off equalizing legislation, by say, calling inheritance taxes a death tax, even though it only applies to them and not the 99%. They are also behind denying climate change, calling it a hoax, in order to deflect attention from the ever increasing rates of fossil fuel consumption. In this environment, “money is free speech” Turchin says. Let there be no doubt who is leading everyone down the path to self-destruction. For Turchin, the “wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.” And unfortunately, “it is too late to avert our current crisis.”
Elite overproduction has taken many forms. In many cases, it was military. The rich sent their children to the armed forces, to serve as admirals and generals. In religious societies, they became cardinals and high priests. Under royalty, they became governors, given stipends and pensions for life. Today, they are CEOs and kingmakers, buying elections to get pliable officials who will increase their wealth. In China, Turchin says, for two thousand years it was the educated. They had to take difficult civil service exams to get into government. To fail the exam meant a peasant’s life. Today, the Communist Party of China still operates this same way. If the Chinese can’t get into the party and pass the tests, they are doomed to have zero power or respect.
And in all these cases, when there are more candidates than positions (Musical Chairs, Turchin calls it), there will be unrest among the elite. And it is the elites who will undermine the system before the 99% get organized. In Turchin’s terms: “The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.” Today’s clue is rich parents bribing school officials to get their (apparently unworthy) children into top universities.
But even that is no guarantee of success, as newly minted lawyers find they begin with a quarter of a million in debt and few prospects to rise to the top in an overstuffed industry.
The civil service figures in another way as well. Smaller societies are not subject to the same cycle, because they might not have an administration, “but once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with bureaucratic empires.” Overpopulation has essentially eliminated that marker, making it merely an interesting footnote.
As I read, my own warped mind kept sliding way out of scope of this book, to ecology. Because just when we’re beginning to understand what needs to be done to save the human race and its ecosphere, civil wars and wartime governments will have no time, no inclination and no money to deal with trivia like climate change. Power itself will be at stake. The 2020s could be the final nail in more than one coffin.
In an appendix, Turchin salutes Isaac Asimov, whose 1960s era Foundation trilogy centered around “psycho-history”, the science fiction notion that the whole galaxy operates on a clear cyclical pattern of governance and inevitability (Turchin calls the real thing “cliodynamics”). Would that Asimov were around today to reflect on that as actually true.
End Times is a six star book, not because of the writing style, which is friendly but a little flabby, but because Turchin pulls together a vast jigsaw puzzle and changes the face of history with it. It is dramatic. Every page is a revelation. Dots are connected. Questions are answered. Relevance gets established where no real importance had been noted before. It is important because it determines, reveals and reinforces a universal truth: it is the lack of governance over the rich that causes all the cyclicality of society. Instability, turmoil and wars can be seen as failure to control the elites from their corrupting influence in society after society, era after era. That is a significant step in our understanding of history and ourselves.
This is a whole new way to see how the human world works. And we should be embarrassed that we didn’t realize it a lot sooner. Because we’re about to pay the price. Again.
David Wineberg
(End Times, Peter Turchin, June 2023)
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
This is quite possibly the most important book of the decade, and affects absolutely everyone. It explains precisely where we are and where we’re heading, based on thousands of years of the same cycles. Unfortunately for the USA, this knowledge comes too late.
To make a long, detailed, involved and complex story short, as the rich grow their families, their children want power and money. They take it from the poor, in low wages, low taxes on capital, removal of rights, reductions in aid, and increases in incarceration and fines (the “wealth pump”). They achieve their goals through a direct line to power, bypassing normal channels. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and more numerous, protests begin. They are chaotic, leaderless and without clear goals. They evolve into bloodletting, literal or physical, which ultimately greatly reduces the number of the elite. Basic wages go up as fewer workers survive and are available, and equality reaches a high point.
And the cycle begins again.
The Chinese have seen this cycle endlessly: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” But Turchin can say this definitively because of a giant database called CrisisDB. It goes back thousands of years, through all kinds of societies and nations. And everywhere he researches, it is the overproduction of elites that strains the system. And causes its demise.
It has long been proclaimed that human society, being composed of individual humans, is far too complex for any kind of model to operate consistently and successfully. But the data say that in high level, general sweeps, patterns and waves occur regularly and predictably. The differences make no difference.
With war, the generation of the war cries loudly – Never again! The next generation enjoys some level of peace, but by the third generation, all is forgotten. People are emboldened again, and ready for the “glory” of another war.
So with politics. Equality reigns for a couple of decades, then distortions begin to appear. Larger numbers of people become fabulously rich, and all their circle want to have their say in power. There aren’t enough positions in government or influence for them, so they become frustrated and embittered. The demands of the rich flood the halls of government. They fund radical candidates, arrange for removals and assassinations, and in general, darken the outlook. Laws begin to dramatically favor the rich at everyone else’s cost.
The 99% become outcasts (flyover country, deplorables, welfare queens, poor, homeless). They look back at their parents, who had decent jobs, decent pay and decent households, and wonder how and why all that went away.
This is exactly what Donald Trump tapped into, even though he clearly had no desire to change any of it. His actions enriched the richest, and his plans were to further impoverish the poor, but his words were to Make America Great Again. That appeal rang truer than anything today’s 99% had ever heard, and they bought into it, hook, line and sinker. But Trump was never going to be the solution. He would only speed up the process to disaster.
Wages had been going down since the 1970s. Unions were shoved out of action. Universities became laughably unaffordable. So did housing. Even life expectancy dropped. Child labor laws are being softened to help suppress minimum wages. This is exactly the configuration of pretty much every civil war and revolution: the rich want their power, and the rest want decent conditions. Something has to give. And it is usually the floor, not the ceiling.
That the lot of the 99% has not and will not improve fits totally into Turchin’s research. Unless someone comes to their aid and reduces the glaring inequality, governments will fall, constitutions will be tossed, domestic terrorism will increase, and civil wars will break out. And elites will light the match. In this decade. The Chinese knew it. So did Tsars Alexander II and III. Yet we keep falling into the same trap.
Turchin has been working at this a long time. His team has built a remarkable dataset. It extends to the point of revealing that:
-When societies are in equilibrium, human height is measurably increased. Americans were the tallest in the world in the 1700s. And before a civil war, people don’t grow nearly as tall; they actually, measurably shrink. It is plain for all to see.
-Life expectancy changes as the cycle approaches the chaos stage. He says American life expectancy has never fallen three years in a row since the Great Depression of 1933. But it has just done so. And Covid-19 is far from exceptional. Major epidemics “are often associated” with these periods.
-“Nearly half of the millionaires who thrived during the Roaring Twenties were wiped out by the Great Depression and the following decades, when worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita.” It was the greatest leveling ever seen in the USA.
-“In one-sixth of the (global) cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state –it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.”
-The “CrisisDB confirms that rise-and-fall cycles in societies with polygamous elites are substantially shorter than such cycles in monogamous societies.” In English – nuclear families produce fewer children, delaying the inevitable competition for power.
In other words, the data has a lot more to tell us than we even know to ask. This is a whole new way to look at the world.
It happens the same way all over and throughout history. Turchin examines not just the US, as it approaches this low point right now, but also England at several points, France, Russia, the Roman Empire and China, which has the longest record of it.
The commonalities occur at every stage. When the cycle is fresh and people are equal, they co-operate. The common good is an important value to them. But as the rich grow in numbers and in wealth, and pull away from the pack, “the sense of national cooperation with which states quickly rot from within” takes over, Turchin says. This is as precise a summation of the US today as I have seen. It is shockingly true. People begin to fear and hate institutions. They want to seal the borders to keep what little is left for themselves.
Turchin points out that it is the ruling class that wants open borders. They mean more competition for jobs, so lower wages and more government aid programs they can manage for profit. He cites Bernie Sanders saying open borders is “a Koch idea” and nothing he supports. But the ruling class always gets its way – until the end. It has been decades since voters had any real say in government. Legislators bow to rich donors. Voters only count during elections, not in legislatures. A billionaire has purchased himself a Supreme Court justice. The rot has become glaringly visible.
It is the ruling class that scares off equalizing legislation, by say, calling inheritance taxes a death tax, even though it only applies to them and not the 99%. They are also behind denying climate change, calling it a hoax, in order to deflect attention from the ever increasing rates of fossil fuel consumption. In this environment, “money is free speech” Turchin says. Let there be no doubt who is leading everyone down the path to self-destruction. For Turchin, the “wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.” And unfortunately, “it is too late to avert our current crisis.”
Elite overproduction has taken many forms. In many cases, it was military. The rich sent their children to the armed forces, to serve as admirals and generals. In religious societies, they became cardinals and high priests. Under royalty, they became governors, given stipends and pensions for life. Today, they are CEOs and kingmakers, buying elections to get pliable officials who will increase their wealth. In China, Turchin says, for two thousand years it was the educated. They had to take difficult civil service exams to get into government. To fail the exam meant a peasant’s life. Today, the Communist Party of China still operates this same way. If the Chinese can’t get into the party and pass the tests, they are doomed to have zero power or respect.
And in all these cases, when there are more candidates than positions (Musical Chairs, Turchin calls it), there will be unrest among the elite. And it is the elites who will undermine the system before the 99% get organized. In Turchin’s terms: “The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.” Today’s clue is rich parents bribing school officials to get their (apparently unworthy) children into top universities.
But even that is no guarantee of success, as newly minted lawyers find they begin with a quarter of a million in debt and few prospects to rise to the top in an overstuffed industry.
The civil service figures in another way as well. Smaller societies are not subject to the same cycle, because they might not have an administration, “but once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with bureaucratic empires.” Overpopulation has essentially eliminated that marker, making it merely an interesting footnote.
As I read, my own warped mind kept sliding way out of scope of this book, to ecology. Because just when we’re beginning to understand what needs to be done to save the human race and its ecosphere, civil wars and wartime governments will have no time, no inclination and no money to deal with trivia like climate change. Power itself will be at stake. The 2020s could be the final nail in more than one coffin.
In an appendix, Turchin salutes Isaac Asimov, whose 1960s era Foundation trilogy centered around “psycho-history”, the science fiction notion that the whole galaxy operates on a clear cyclical pattern of governance and inevitability (Turchin calls the real thing “cliodynamics”). Would that Asimov were around today to reflect on that as actually true.
End Times is a six star book, not because of the writing style, which is friendly but a little flabby, but because Turchin pulls together a vast jigsaw puzzle and changes the face of history with it. It is dramatic. Every page is a revelation. Dots are connected. Questions are answered. Relevance gets established where no real importance had been noted before. It is important because it determines, reveals and reinforces a universal truth: it is the lack of governance over the rich that causes all the cyclicality of society. Instability, turmoil and wars can be seen as failure to control the elites from their corrupting influence in society after society, era after era. That is a significant step in our understanding of history and ourselves.
This is a whole new way to see how the human world works. And we should be embarrassed that we didn’t realize it a lot sooner. Because we’re about to pay the price. Again.
David Wineberg
(End Times, Peter Turchin, June 2023)
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
July 9, 2023
When computers come back with racist results, we rightly attribute it to their programming. When a computer model seems to confirm your preferred political theory, we should also attribute it to its programming.
I'm not a skeptic of the possibility of cliodynamics as a science. I think we will find signal in the noise with enough analysis, enough to make some testable predictions. I agree with Turchin's basic point that you probably need some explanatory theory to go with it for it to make sense, but here's where the error can get introduced. There's very little in this book that Turchin's database comes up with that an AI trained on Howard Zinn books and Bernie Sanders speeches wouldn't come up with.
But so many of the statistical proxies used in this book seem forced. Turchin uses height to measure popular immiseration. Yet India consistently shows up among the happiest nations. There's more to it than that. Maybe he should just call it poorer nutrition and not immiseration. Some of the groupings are bizarre too. Is the Great Depression really the same thing or as bad the Civil War? Are labor riots where 52 people die in the same class as those at all?
Worse, things that are bad in one context (trade) are good in the other (lifting a grain tariff). Sometimes, we need to listen to the people's voice, sometimes they're just pawns of propaganda. (And you can bet those times correlate with Turchin's views.) "Avowed Neo Nazi" Azov brigades are bad, but Neo Nazis storming the Capitol don't get labeled as such when that topic comes up. The media elite sways the people but college professors are too busy studying bugs (very self-serving for a college professor, no?) So much tendentiousness.
All of our alt-left tropes are here. It was the Clintons who done it! A skeptical take on Ukraine. Trump was trying to do x but the ruling class (read: deep state) stopped him. Noam Chomsky has been silenced!! (Seriously, my god he hasn’t had a NYT Op-ed since March!) The elites stopped Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 (those elite black South Carolinians, I tell you!) I was getting ready for a hot anti-vax take, but it didn't make the cut. An extended glowup of Tucker Carlson did. No mention of a Democratic president spending his entire political capital to try and stop the popular immiseration with healthcare. Why are these populists opposed to Medicaid expansion and the CFPB? Why do they push through only huge corporate tax cuts but no minimum wage rise?
I could go on. It's Horseshoe Theory: the book. Anyone who thinks Trump was a populist loses credibility with me. His rhetoric was, at least at the start, but now he just whines about losing. But if you ignore Twitter, Trump was a standard issue post-Eisenhower Republican. His lasting achievements are a tax cut (rise on blue states) and appointing judges who overturned Roe. Populist? Nah.
Among many flaws in Turchin's "theoretical model" is a flawed understanding of our Constitutional system. If the parties who won elections in the US could enact their platforms wholesale, it would make more sense to talk about the Ruling Class vetoing this or that. The reality is there are too many veto points and unless you have the rare consensus, nothing will happen. Nothing happening is the default in our system no matter who wins. If Turchin’s model held without epicycles, more pro-elite things would happen than they do. There is basically zero discussion of Obama because his main achievement was a massive program to counter popular immiseration right in the time when Turchin’s model says the elites should only be allowing “fuck you I got mine.”
The basic case that "elite overproduction" and "popular immiseration" lead to political troubles seems almost tautological and less of a scientific theory of political turbulence, again, if for no other reason than all manner of different events seem to fall under Turchin's rubric of turbulent periods.
Turchin's background is as a biologist and his Malthusian priors seem to dominate everything. This is why he writes at length against immigration and for a sort of redistributive political agenda while oddly at the same time saying we have one. Again, it's hard to describe how all over the place this book is. He has this very Russian/Tolstoian Deterministic view of history that discounts leadership as just a "Great Man" theory while paying lip service to the "nudges" leadership can provide.
If anything from a few riots to a civil war is a crisis, then you can definitely say they show up at regular intervals. I don't think this book ads much to anything mainly for that reason.
Despite his background as a biologist, he seems to misunderstand what is science and what is not. While there is no universally agreed upon test, the most often one is that science produces empirically falsifiable hypothesis (Popper). What Turchin claims is the definition, however, disagrees with none other than Isaac Newton. Turchin claims using theory to explain phenomena is pseudo-science. That may be a prudential truism in social sciences, but if you believe this applies generally, then you can throw out, for example, dark matter. We use the theory of General Relativity and to explain observations about the acceleration of the universe. It takes more than one observation to break a theory that explains a lot of verified phenomena, but Turchin doesn't make that distinction.
If Turchin is proposing a new philosophy of science, he needs to do a lot more work than is here. I think he goes down this rabbit hole to explain why cliodynamics isn't a pseudoscience and some conspiracy theories are. Again, I think cliodynamics can be a science and it's Turchin himself that proposes a theory of it: popular immiseration and elite overproduction and it is Turchin himself that sort of blurs lines to keep that theory working. He's made a prediction about the 2020s, so we'll see if he accepts the results or does what pseudoscientists do and add epicycles, which is different. It's a fine line, but it's one that has been accepted since Newton. His basic explanatory theory, that class dynamics drive history, isn't much different from Marxism—he just adds a Malthusian take on population dynamics—and let's just say that whatever else Marx claimed, the sort of Hegelian nous of history isn't one of his empirically verified ones.
I'm sympathetic to some of the views in here, but I didn't leave the book persuaded about anything. On the contrary, it made me worry I'm as echo chambered as Turchin.
I'm not a skeptic of the possibility of cliodynamics as a science. I think we will find signal in the noise with enough analysis, enough to make some testable predictions. I agree with Turchin's basic point that you probably need some explanatory theory to go with it for it to make sense, but here's where the error can get introduced. There's very little in this book that Turchin's database comes up with that an AI trained on Howard Zinn books and Bernie Sanders speeches wouldn't come up with.
But so many of the statistical proxies used in this book seem forced. Turchin uses height to measure popular immiseration. Yet India consistently shows up among the happiest nations. There's more to it than that. Maybe he should just call it poorer nutrition and not immiseration. Some of the groupings are bizarre too. Is the Great Depression really the same thing or as bad the Civil War? Are labor riots where 52 people die in the same class as those at all?
Worse, things that are bad in one context (trade) are good in the other (lifting a grain tariff). Sometimes, we need to listen to the people's voice, sometimes they're just pawns of propaganda. (And you can bet those times correlate with Turchin's views.) "Avowed Neo Nazi" Azov brigades are bad, but Neo Nazis storming the Capitol don't get labeled as such when that topic comes up. The media elite sways the people but college professors are too busy studying bugs (very self-serving for a college professor, no?) So much tendentiousness.
All of our alt-left tropes are here. It was the Clintons who done it! A skeptical take on Ukraine. Trump was trying to do x but the ruling class (read: deep state) stopped him. Noam Chomsky has been silenced!! (Seriously, my god he hasn’t had a NYT Op-ed since March!) The elites stopped Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 (those elite black South Carolinians, I tell you!) I was getting ready for a hot anti-vax take, but it didn't make the cut. An extended glowup of Tucker Carlson did. No mention of a Democratic president spending his entire political capital to try and stop the popular immiseration with healthcare. Why are these populists opposed to Medicaid expansion and the CFPB? Why do they push through only huge corporate tax cuts but no minimum wage rise?
I could go on. It's Horseshoe Theory: the book. Anyone who thinks Trump was a populist loses credibility with me. His rhetoric was, at least at the start, but now he just whines about losing. But if you ignore Twitter, Trump was a standard issue post-Eisenhower Republican. His lasting achievements are a tax cut (rise on blue states) and appointing judges who overturned Roe. Populist? Nah.
Among many flaws in Turchin's "theoretical model" is a flawed understanding of our Constitutional system. If the parties who won elections in the US could enact their platforms wholesale, it would make more sense to talk about the Ruling Class vetoing this or that. The reality is there are too many veto points and unless you have the rare consensus, nothing will happen. Nothing happening is the default in our system no matter who wins. If Turchin’s model held without epicycles, more pro-elite things would happen than they do. There is basically zero discussion of Obama because his main achievement was a massive program to counter popular immiseration right in the time when Turchin’s model says the elites should only be allowing “fuck you I got mine.”
The basic case that "elite overproduction" and "popular immiseration" lead to political troubles seems almost tautological and less of a scientific theory of political turbulence, again, if for no other reason than all manner of different events seem to fall under Turchin's rubric of turbulent periods.
Turchin's background is as a biologist and his Malthusian priors seem to dominate everything. This is why he writes at length against immigration and for a sort of redistributive political agenda while oddly at the same time saying we have one. Again, it's hard to describe how all over the place this book is. He has this very Russian/Tolstoian Deterministic view of history that discounts leadership as just a "Great Man" theory while paying lip service to the "nudges" leadership can provide.
If anything from a few riots to a civil war is a crisis, then you can definitely say they show up at regular intervals. I don't think this book ads much to anything mainly for that reason.
Despite his background as a biologist, he seems to misunderstand what is science and what is not. While there is no universally agreed upon test, the most often one is that science produces empirically falsifiable hypothesis (Popper). What Turchin claims is the definition, however, disagrees with none other than Isaac Newton. Turchin claims using theory to explain phenomena is pseudo-science. That may be a prudential truism in social sciences, but if you believe this applies generally, then you can throw out, for example, dark matter. We use the theory of General Relativity and to explain observations about the acceleration of the universe. It takes more than one observation to break a theory that explains a lot of verified phenomena, but Turchin doesn't make that distinction.
If Turchin is proposing a new philosophy of science, he needs to do a lot more work than is here. I think he goes down this rabbit hole to explain why cliodynamics isn't a pseudoscience and some conspiracy theories are. Again, I think cliodynamics can be a science and it's Turchin himself that proposes a theory of it: popular immiseration and elite overproduction and it is Turchin himself that sort of blurs lines to keep that theory working. He's made a prediction about the 2020s, so we'll see if he accepts the results or does what pseudoscientists do and add epicycles, which is different. It's a fine line, but it's one that has been accepted since Newton. His basic explanatory theory, that class dynamics drive history, isn't much different from Marxism—he just adds a Malthusian take on population dynamics—and let's just say that whatever else Marx claimed, the sort of Hegelian nous of history isn't one of his empirically verified ones.
I'm sympathetic to some of the views in here, but I didn't leave the book persuaded about anything. On the contrary, it made me worry I'm as echo chambered as Turchin.
October 26, 2023
So, in 2016, Peter Turchin published "Ages of Discord", the book in which he applied "cliodynamics" to the modern United States of America. Cliodynamics is an attempt to bring numerical methods from the biological sciences (for example, in modeling how predator and prey populations interact) to human societies. In it, he repeated the prediction (which he first publicly made in an article in a scholarly journal in 2010) that the US was headed for a political crisis, potentially to the brink of civil war, in around the year 2020. Needless to say, while the events of 2020 did not quite match the events of 1861, they did come closer than at any time in a century and a half (the election of 1876 being the last one which resulted in such a divisive result). This resulted in Turchin getting quite a bit more exposure to the general public, probably reaching a crescendo when the Atlantic Monthly published an article on him. However, while many became curious, one major thing held people back from buying "Ages of Discord", in order to help understand what the underlying forces were tearing the social fabric apart.
"Ages of Discord", the book, had equations in it.
Let's face it, that is a dealbreaker for a lot of people. It's not like there were very many, it's not like they went beyond basic algebra, it's not like the reader had to solve any of those equations anyway. Nonetheless, the presence of an equation, or any mathematical notation really, is just anathema to most readers, for whatever reason. Thus, while there was a lot of buzz around Turchin, most people did not read it. I even had a friend who, in the wake of the inauguration day protests/riot (it's a sign of how divided we are that we cannot as a society even agree on what to call the events of that day), borrowed my copy, and never got around to reading it because, you know, math.
So, Turchin is back¸ and he's left the math behind.
There is not a single equation to be found in "End Times". There is not a single graph. The content, conceptually, is much the same, but it is all in words, sometimes in short character sketches. One is reminded of the scene in the original Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, where the elder psychohistorian challenges the young one to explain the current situation without using any math. I found it a little annoying, myself, since I much prefer graphs and numbers (and charts and maps and photographs and drawings) along with the words. But, if you're the type for whom all of that non-word content is distracting, or worse yet distressing, this is the book to explain to you What The Heck Is Wrong With People.
Turchin's thesis is probably not one that I can really summarize here (if I could, you wouldn't need a book), but the most important part is that there is a repeating cycle in human history, including the United States:
phase 1: Things are generally good for the populace; they can eat well, do better than the generation before, support kids, etc. etc. The elite, of course, do much better than the general populace (more or less by definition), but everyone is seeing things get better over time.
phase 2: The growth starts to slow down (for one of many reasons), and the elite start to turn the screws harder in order to keep things improving for themselves. This means that the general populace starts to see their position stagnate, or even get worse. Because the general populace has little or no organizational experience, however, this results in little (aside from grumbling).
phase 3: The elite start to have so much trouble maintaining their upward trajectory, that it causes a split between the top of the elite, and the lower part. The upper elite try to do to the lower elite, what the elite in general did to the general populace (squeeze more out of them, to keep more for yourself). However, there is one big problem; the lower elite have organizational and rhetorical and leadership skills (and practice) that the general population does not. A counter-elite forms, rallying popular discontent in an attempt to displace the upper elite.
phase 4: The crisis, where the conflict between the elite and the counter-elite (backed by popular discontent) reaches the boiling point. This lasts until it results in either the old elite being killed off and replaced by the counter-elite, or the two elites both suffer so many losses that they are now (even together) small enough in size to not need to squeeze the populace so hard, or in more recent times the rates of crime, rioting, etc. reach levels that alarm the elites into changing the rules so that more of society's wealth stays with the general populace. Return to phase 1.
Now, there is a lot of detail to each of these phases, and it does not happen in exactly the same way everywhere (or everywhen). In ancient Rome, there was a lot of fratricide and assassination among the elites during phase 4. In 19th century America, the old elite (plantation owners in the South, merchants in the North who shipped the plantation-produced goods to Europe) were displaced by the new industrial elite, and power at the national level shifted away from the South and towards the North. In the mid-20th century, a smaller crisis was resolved when the specter of communism in eastern Europe scared the wealthy elite into sharing more with the general populace. Turchin does a good job of demonstrating how each phase works, why each one leads inexorably towards the next, and why it is happening now.
Turchin has stated, on a number of occasions, that there is nothing inevitable about lurching towards a civil war. We have the capacity to change how this all works. However, before we can fix the problem, we need to understand where it comes from. If math is not how you naturally think, but you would still like to get a better understanding of what has been pushing society in the direction it's been going in recent decades, Turchin has made a book that speaks your language.
"Ages of Discord", the book, had equations in it.
Let's face it, that is a dealbreaker for a lot of people. It's not like there were very many, it's not like they went beyond basic algebra, it's not like the reader had to solve any of those equations anyway. Nonetheless, the presence of an equation, or any mathematical notation really, is just anathema to most readers, for whatever reason. Thus, while there was a lot of buzz around Turchin, most people did not read it. I even had a friend who, in the wake of the inauguration day protests/riot (it's a sign of how divided we are that we cannot as a society even agree on what to call the events of that day), borrowed my copy, and never got around to reading it because, you know, math.
So, Turchin is back¸ and he's left the math behind.
There is not a single equation to be found in "End Times". There is not a single graph. The content, conceptually, is much the same, but it is all in words, sometimes in short character sketches. One is reminded of the scene in the original Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, where the elder psychohistorian challenges the young one to explain the current situation without using any math. I found it a little annoying, myself, since I much prefer graphs and numbers (and charts and maps and photographs and drawings) along with the words. But, if you're the type for whom all of that non-word content is distracting, or worse yet distressing, this is the book to explain to you What The Heck Is Wrong With People.
Turchin's thesis is probably not one that I can really summarize here (if I could, you wouldn't need a book), but the most important part is that there is a repeating cycle in human history, including the United States:
phase 1: Things are generally good for the populace; they can eat well, do better than the generation before, support kids, etc. etc. The elite, of course, do much better than the general populace (more or less by definition), but everyone is seeing things get better over time.
phase 2: The growth starts to slow down (for one of many reasons), and the elite start to turn the screws harder in order to keep things improving for themselves. This means that the general populace starts to see their position stagnate, or even get worse. Because the general populace has little or no organizational experience, however, this results in little (aside from grumbling).
phase 3: The elite start to have so much trouble maintaining their upward trajectory, that it causes a split between the top of the elite, and the lower part. The upper elite try to do to the lower elite, what the elite in general did to the general populace (squeeze more out of them, to keep more for yourself). However, there is one big problem; the lower elite have organizational and rhetorical and leadership skills (and practice) that the general population does not. A counter-elite forms, rallying popular discontent in an attempt to displace the upper elite.
phase 4: The crisis, where the conflict between the elite and the counter-elite (backed by popular discontent) reaches the boiling point. This lasts until it results in either the old elite being killed off and replaced by the counter-elite, or the two elites both suffer so many losses that they are now (even together) small enough in size to not need to squeeze the populace so hard, or in more recent times the rates of crime, rioting, etc. reach levels that alarm the elites into changing the rules so that more of society's wealth stays with the general populace. Return to phase 1.
Now, there is a lot of detail to each of these phases, and it does not happen in exactly the same way everywhere (or everywhen). In ancient Rome, there was a lot of fratricide and assassination among the elites during phase 4. In 19th century America, the old elite (plantation owners in the South, merchants in the North who shipped the plantation-produced goods to Europe) were displaced by the new industrial elite, and power at the national level shifted away from the South and towards the North. In the mid-20th century, a smaller crisis was resolved when the specter of communism in eastern Europe scared the wealthy elite into sharing more with the general populace. Turchin does a good job of demonstrating how each phase works, why each one leads inexorably towards the next, and why it is happening now.
Turchin has stated, on a number of occasions, that there is nothing inevitable about lurching towards a civil war. We have the capacity to change how this all works. However, before we can fix the problem, we need to understand where it comes from. If math is not how you naturally think, but you would still like to get a better understanding of what has been pushing society in the direction it's been going in recent decades, Turchin has made a book that speaks your language.
May 4, 2024
Cum explicăm ascensiunea lui Trump?
Majoritatea cărților se concentrează pe factorul economic. Este "revolta muncitorului american alb". În ultimele decenii, în SUA, productivitatea economică a tot crescut, în timp ce salariile muncitorilor au stagnat. Cauzele sunt diverse, de la mutarea fabricilor peste granițe la automatizare. Ceea ce aduce Peter Turchin nou în discuție este supraproducția de elite. Sărăcirea maselor și supraproducția de elite creează un cocktail exploziv. Elitele pot organiza și canaliza frustrarea populară.
Masele au sărăcit, dar elitele au prosperat. Piramida a devenit foarte grea la vârf. Numărul de locuri disponibile în structurile statului nu s-a schimbat. Competiția acerbă dintre elite face ca riscul ca regulile jocului să fie încălcate să fie foarte mare. Trump este primul președinte american care anterior nu a ocupat nicio funcție publică. Și-a încheiat mandatul cu o insurecție.
Istoricul Ibn Khaldun a observat că o dinastie durează în lumea musulmană în jur de o sută de ani. în Europa, în acea perioadă, o dinastie dura două-trei secole. Poligamia din lumea musulmană duce la o supraproducție de elite.
Recomand
Majoritatea cărților se concentrează pe factorul economic. Este "revolta muncitorului american alb". În ultimele decenii, în SUA, productivitatea economică a tot crescut, în timp ce salariile muncitorilor au stagnat. Cauzele sunt diverse, de la mutarea fabricilor peste granițe la automatizare. Ceea ce aduce Peter Turchin nou în discuție este supraproducția de elite. Sărăcirea maselor și supraproducția de elite creează un cocktail exploziv. Elitele pot organiza și canaliza frustrarea populară.
Masele au sărăcit, dar elitele au prosperat. Piramida a devenit foarte grea la vârf. Numărul de locuri disponibile în structurile statului nu s-a schimbat. Competiția acerbă dintre elite face ca riscul ca regulile jocului să fie încălcate să fie foarte mare. Trump este primul președinte american care anterior nu a ocupat nicio funcție publică. Și-a încheiat mandatul cu o insurecție.
Istoricul Ibn Khaldun a observat că o dinastie durează în lumea musulmană în jur de o sută de ani. în Europa, în acea perioadă, o dinastie dura două-trei secole. Poligamia din lumea musulmană duce la o supraproducție de elite.
Recomand
August 17, 2023
I made the mistake of buying this book after thumbing through it and thinking it looked interesting. What a disappointment. It claims to be about some grand, scientific theory of history named “cliodynamics” but this superficial book is remarkably free of analysis, statistics or deep insight.
Chapters often begin with some story of made up characters who are stereotypes that the author wants to propagate - mostly some cartoonish limousine liberal vs. some hard working, down on his luck, white working class dude. His historical vignettesre no better - e.g., a brief outline of Egypt’s history of a tendency toward military dictatorship, from which he draws the conclusion that “in order to understand the forces of instablity…we have to place them within the institutional frameworks of the country we are interested in.” Duh?
If you want to know what this book is about, skip to page 216 when he lavishes praise on Tucker Carlson, admitting that “His critique of the American ruling class in many places parallels our analysis of the social forces driving the United States to the edge.” Yep, the author buys the nonsense about Trump, Carlson and company being “populists” because they harness the anger of a lot of lower and lower-middle class white people - despite the fact that the whole point of that charade is to direct that anger away from billionaires like Trump so that the plutocrat class can continue to keep its taxes low and get away with every crime in the book.
The author, in his endless effort to comply with the mainstream media’s “Both sides are always equal” mandate, repeats a lot of Fox News propaganda as gospel truth, e.g., that “antifa” is some kind of major faction of the Democratic party as opposed to a small number of kids in a tiny number of cities who liked to pretend to be ninjas. And he more than once denounces the entirety of the evidence of Putin’s millions of dollars of investment to help Trump win and Trump’s later, multiple paybacks to Russia as just a “conspiracy theory.”
So if you’re looking for one more opportunity to be reassured that all your right wing fantasies are true, here’s one more book for you…
Chapters often begin with some story of made up characters who are stereotypes that the author wants to propagate - mostly some cartoonish limousine liberal vs. some hard working, down on his luck, white working class dude. His historical vignettesre no better - e.g., a brief outline of Egypt’s history of a tendency toward military dictatorship, from which he draws the conclusion that “in order to understand the forces of instablity…we have to place them within the institutional frameworks of the country we are interested in.” Duh?
If you want to know what this book is about, skip to page 216 when he lavishes praise on Tucker Carlson, admitting that “His critique of the American ruling class in many places parallels our analysis of the social forces driving the United States to the edge.” Yep, the author buys the nonsense about Trump, Carlson and company being “populists” because they harness the anger of a lot of lower and lower-middle class white people - despite the fact that the whole point of that charade is to direct that anger away from billionaires like Trump so that the plutocrat class can continue to keep its taxes low and get away with every crime in the book.
The author, in his endless effort to comply with the mainstream media’s “Both sides are always equal” mandate, repeats a lot of Fox News propaganda as gospel truth, e.g., that “antifa” is some kind of major faction of the Democratic party as opposed to a small number of kids in a tiny number of cities who liked to pretend to be ninjas. And he more than once denounces the entirety of the evidence of Putin’s millions of dollars of investment to help Trump win and Trump’s later, multiple paybacks to Russia as just a “conspiracy theory.”
So if you’re looking for one more opportunity to be reassured that all your right wing fantasies are true, here’s one more book for you…
September 16, 2023
Good book. Kind of academic but describes modern America pretty well.
It’s billed dramatically but the author is basically just saying we’re going through the same period of inflection as we did in like 1910s to 1920s. Middle 1800s, etc. Overproduction of educated “Elite” leads to a lot of sniping among well educated upper class. We don’t have enough good jobs so things get highly competitive. That competition leads to turmoil and things like Trump. None of that is super new, but I think he presents it well
I think the drawback of this book is that it is largely a liberal arts theory masquerading as a more rigorous framework. Having graphs and scoring on your theory does not all of a sudden turn it into physics. It helps. And I think this guy is way closer to some sort of objective truth then most of the chuckle fucks who wax polemical on these topics. The author convincingly shows a lot of the similarities between historical events and current situation. But I think the sort of original sin for all of these sorts of theories is that they want to be predictive in a domain, where prediction is very tenuous. It’s easy for your theory to sound beautiful in hindsight. It’s a lot harder to make some thing that actually allows good decisions in the future.
It’s billed dramatically but the author is basically just saying we’re going through the same period of inflection as we did in like 1910s to 1920s. Middle 1800s, etc. Overproduction of educated “Elite” leads to a lot of sniping among well educated upper class. We don’t have enough good jobs so things get highly competitive. That competition leads to turmoil and things like Trump. None of that is super new, but I think he presents it well
I think the drawback of this book is that it is largely a liberal arts theory masquerading as a more rigorous framework. Having graphs and scoring on your theory does not all of a sudden turn it into physics. It helps. And I think this guy is way closer to some sort of objective truth then most of the chuckle fucks who wax polemical on these topics. The author convincingly shows a lot of the similarities between historical events and current situation. But I think the sort of original sin for all of these sorts of theories is that they want to be predictive in a domain, where prediction is very tenuous. It’s easy for your theory to sound beautiful in hindsight. It’s a lot harder to make some thing that actually allows good decisions in the future.
August 1, 2023
Подход к описанию политики и истории, который хотелось бы видеть почаще. Меньше красивых историй, больше информации и данных и основанных на них теорий, способных правильно предсказывать повороты истории, а не только «объяснять ее задним числом». Жаль только что автор сам не всегда идет в русле своего же подхода
July 20, 2023
Of the 40ish books I read every year, there's usually one or two that blow me away with how much sense they make; books that offer such illuminating insights and perspectives that they change the way I think about certain issues. "End Times" is one such book. I'm a latecomer to his work, but Peter Turchin's twin lens of "popular immiseration" and "elite overproduction" as historically reliable precursors of political crises slots so many things into focus it's kind of eerie. 5/5
Read
April 5, 2024If you've read Asimov's Foundation series, you'd know psychohistory - the 'science' that predicts the future of humanity at large. Peter Turchin is on a similar path, though he does call out the underlying methodology of psychohistory as pseudoscience and in his version, attempts to do it with a lot of data and actual science. The field is cliodynamics, focusing on political integration and disintegration, and state formation and collapse. He and his colleagues have discovered recurring patterns in history over the last ten thousand years, and some common underlying principles on why this happens.
The book begins with a look at the sources of power and its correlation with wealth. The former is of at least four types - force, wealth, bureaucratic, and ideological. It then takes a quick look at contemporary America, and specifically the reasons for the rise of Trump. I found the parallels with the 1850s, Lincoln, and the Civil war that his election triggered, quite insightful. (it really wasn't just about slavery, the business and economic interests were the much broader canvas)
And how does this power dissipate? From his research, the lessons history teaches is that there are four structural drivers of instability - popular immiseration (impoverishment of the working class) leading to mass mobilisation potential; elite overproduction (too many elites vying for too few seats of power and wealth) leading to intraelite conflict; Failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The second is the most reliable predictor.
With this context, he delves into each of these factors in the subsequent chapters. An interesting point in the popular immiseration is the impact of immigration - how it drives down wages because of the overabundance of labour. In the second- elite overproduction, he quotes Guy Standing on the so-called 'precariat'- "It consists of people who went to college, promised by their parents, teachers, and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realise they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions." And David Callahan - "As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper sections of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic - or sleazy - efforts don't guarantee a superior edge."
He then points to how the two parties in the US have moved away from their original audience and stance, and how ideological fragmentation has progressed so far that any classification has become impossible. And we're now dominated by radical politics. America is now a plutocracy - economic elites who are able to influence policy with its "structural economic power". The issues in which they are in disagreement with the common folks always get decided in the elites' favour. Plutocrats are able to create a vulnerability in democracies because they use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. A three part way of controlling public perceptions of practically anything! The chapter 'Why is America a plutocracy' also has an insightful section on why the US didn't turn out like Denmark despite being at roughly the same place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the last section, he looks at history to understand the possible outcomes for the US in the future- how the trajectory of post USSR Slavic states - Ukraine, Belarus - and Russia differed. He also goes further back to look at examples of states that have survived by taking measures to prevent collapse -
England in the Chartist period, Russia in the Reform period. In the US now, the Democratic Party is a now of the 10 percent and the 1 percent. And the 1 percent is losing its traditional vehicle - the Republican party, which is increasingly being taken over by right-wing populist factions. Once upon a time, American elites successfully adopted reforms to rebalance the social system. It's either that or they get overthrown.
While Turchin gets technical, the narrative is coherent and insightful. It also brings science to the many signs of decay we see around us. Overall, an excellent read, if you're interested in the broad subject.
Notes
1. George RR Martin based Lannisters in GoT on Lancasters in the 1400s
2. Just as physical contagions were a driver in empires collapsing, idea contagions are in today's environment (Arab Spring)
3. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, and then the Gilded Age (excess) followed by the Progressive Era (reforms). For two generations after the 1930s the elite proactively did things for improving the conditions of the masses, but from the 1980s, the concentration of wealth began again.
The book begins with a look at the sources of power and its correlation with wealth. The former is of at least four types - force, wealth, bureaucratic, and ideological. It then takes a quick look at contemporary America, and specifically the reasons for the rise of Trump. I found the parallels with the 1850s, Lincoln, and the Civil war that his election triggered, quite insightful. (it really wasn't just about slavery, the business and economic interests were the much broader canvas)
And how does this power dissipate? From his research, the lessons history teaches is that there are four structural drivers of instability - popular immiseration (impoverishment of the working class) leading to mass mobilisation potential; elite overproduction (too many elites vying for too few seats of power and wealth) leading to intraelite conflict; Failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The second is the most reliable predictor.
With this context, he delves into each of these factors in the subsequent chapters. An interesting point in the popular immiseration is the impact of immigration - how it drives down wages because of the overabundance of labour. In the second- elite overproduction, he quotes Guy Standing on the so-called 'precariat'- "It consists of people who went to college, promised by their parents, teachers, and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realise they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions." And David Callahan - "As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper sections of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic - or sleazy - efforts don't guarantee a superior edge."
He then points to how the two parties in the US have moved away from their original audience and stance, and how ideological fragmentation has progressed so far that any classification has become impossible. And we're now dominated by radical politics. America is now a plutocracy - economic elites who are able to influence policy with its "structural economic power". The issues in which they are in disagreement with the common folks always get decided in the elites' favour. Plutocrats are able to create a vulnerability in democracies because they use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. A three part way of controlling public perceptions of practically anything! The chapter 'Why is America a plutocracy' also has an insightful section on why the US didn't turn out like Denmark despite being at roughly the same place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the last section, he looks at history to understand the possible outcomes for the US in the future- how the trajectory of post USSR Slavic states - Ukraine, Belarus - and Russia differed. He also goes further back to look at examples of states that have survived by taking measures to prevent collapse -
England in the Chartist period, Russia in the Reform period. In the US now, the Democratic Party is a now of the 10 percent and the 1 percent. And the 1 percent is losing its traditional vehicle - the Republican party, which is increasingly being taken over by right-wing populist factions. Once upon a time, American elites successfully adopted reforms to rebalance the social system. It's either that or they get overthrown.
While Turchin gets technical, the narrative is coherent and insightful. It also brings science to the many signs of decay we see around us. Overall, an excellent read, if you're interested in the broad subject.
Notes
1. George RR Martin based Lannisters in GoT on Lancasters in the 1400s
2. Just as physical contagions were a driver in empires collapsing, idea contagions are in today's environment (Arab Spring)
3. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, and then the Gilded Age (excess) followed by the Progressive Era (reforms). For two generations after the 1930s the elite proactively did things for improving the conditions of the masses, but from the 1980s, the concentration of wealth began again.
July 20, 2023
Years ago, I read Turchin's book, "Historical Dynamics,” in which he described his first attempts to bring mathematical modeling to human history. At the time, I was disappointed to find that the book contained no more than a collection of disjoint empirical models whose parameters had been adjusted to fit the data. There was no unified framework to bring all the disparate pieces together.
“End Times” was written twenty years after “Historical Dynamics”. The ad hoc models have been replaced by a system of coupled equations not unlike those used in other global models, though much simpler. Unfortunately, he spends little time discussing the models themselves. All the details are glossed over in one short chapter near the end of the book, and the interested reader is referred to the bibliography.
For most of the book he tries to convince the reader that he has found a unifying principle underlying human history: overproduction of elites leads to wealth inequality and societal crises. The problem with this principle is that he defines elites in terms of wealth, which turns his principle into a tautology: The overproduction of high-wealth individuals leads to wealth inequality and societal crises. I doubt many people would have any problem with that statement.
One point that I am sure many people will be taken aback by is his critique of what he calls the "Credentialed Class", i.e., people with advanced college degrees. Most people will be surprised to learn that Turchin believes the country suffers from an overproduction of STEM workers, doctors, lawyers, and economist which in turn will lead to widespread disillusion and form a fertile breeding ground for violent revolutionaries when these people find that their credentials failed to lift them into the high wealth class of their predecessors.
Most of the analysis in the book is not based upon mathematical modeling at all; rather, it it is an examination of the "crisis database" created by Turchin and his colleagues. Using the database, he provides a nice survey of the crises that befell previous societies when they failed to reduce wealth inequality voluntarily. Over and over again, the historical record shows that elites were routinely butchered when the masses suffered widespread immiseration.
In the end, Turchin’s main argument is that the US is in a crisis because it has produced too many elites (i.e., high-wealth individuals), and to get out of its current crisis, wealth inequality must be reduced. While I tend to agree with him on this point, I’m just not sure we needed cliodynamics to tell us that.
“End Times” was written twenty years after “Historical Dynamics”. The ad hoc models have been replaced by a system of coupled equations not unlike those used in other global models, though much simpler. Unfortunately, he spends little time discussing the models themselves. All the details are glossed over in one short chapter near the end of the book, and the interested reader is referred to the bibliography.
For most of the book he tries to convince the reader that he has found a unifying principle underlying human history: overproduction of elites leads to wealth inequality and societal crises. The problem with this principle is that he defines elites in terms of wealth, which turns his principle into a tautology: The overproduction of high-wealth individuals leads to wealth inequality and societal crises. I doubt many people would have any problem with that statement.
One point that I am sure many people will be taken aback by is his critique of what he calls the "Credentialed Class", i.e., people with advanced college degrees. Most people will be surprised to learn that Turchin believes the country suffers from an overproduction of STEM workers, doctors, lawyers, and economist which in turn will lead to widespread disillusion and form a fertile breeding ground for violent revolutionaries when these people find that their credentials failed to lift them into the high wealth class of their predecessors.
Most of the analysis in the book is not based upon mathematical modeling at all; rather, it it is an examination of the "crisis database" created by Turchin and his colleagues. Using the database, he provides a nice survey of the crises that befell previous societies when they failed to reduce wealth inequality voluntarily. Over and over again, the historical record shows that elites were routinely butchered when the masses suffered widespread immiseration.
In the end, Turchin’s main argument is that the US is in a crisis because it has produced too many elites (i.e., high-wealth individuals), and to get out of its current crisis, wealth inequality must be reduced. While I tend to agree with him on this point, I’m just not sure we needed cliodynamics to tell us that.
January 17, 2024
Lay oriented overview of Turchins model of history
with no math or rigorous breakdown of theories.
with no math or rigorous breakdown of theories.
August 25, 2023
This is a great book, and very good for understanding the underlying reasons for the contemporary problems we’re having with our polarized, plutocratic society. Will the USA survive to 2026? How can we deal with social conflict and disorder? Why does it seem to be worsening? We have to look at the underlying causes of social conflict in scientific terms, and to discover that, you look at history, with actual data!
This is well-written and much more understandable for ordinary people than his other books, such as Secular Cycles and Ages of Discord, which were also excellent but very academic. Since we’re currently experiencing a lot of social disruption lately, his analysis is right to the point of much of our current political experience. The upshot, for Turchin, is that inequality as the key driver of social disruption and the potential disintegration of the United States. Turchin’s ideas often echo those of Marx, but he is not a Marxist and in fact approaches the data dispassionately, as a scientist.
There are two things about Turchin’s ideas which stand out. First, the role of the elites in growing inequality; and secondly, the relative absence of environmental issues in our growing crisis.
The elites drive inequality. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But this does NOT mechanically cause a revolution. In fact, the “masses” almost never succeed at a revolution as long as the elites are united, no matter how oppressed they are. To have a revolution, you need to get organized; to get organized, you need resources — but the elites have all the resources. So there are echoes of Lenin, also, who stressed that the masses will never rise up, without a revolutionary party to help out.
It is disaffected elites, not the masses, who propel social disruption. It is inevitable, by the way, that there will be disaffected elites, as Turchin explains. The elites bring about the social crises which he describes. The elites use their power, naturally enough, to get more power and money. So, the rich get richer. So far, so good — for the elites, anyway. Sorry about your declining living standards, oppressed masses. In fact, the oppression of the masses actually HELPS the elites further, because of declining labor costs, and therefore even greater profits.
But this encourages “elite aspirants”— people who are not quite elites, but who are encouraged with all this increasing wealth to imagine themselves as getting in on the action. You, too, could be a millionaire! This is the process of what Turchin calls “elite overproduction.”
This works for a while, but in the long run, this doesn’t work out well for the elites, as you might guess. As the number of elites increase, and more and more people try to get in on the action, many will inevitably fail. So there are also an increasing number of elites, as well as frustrated elites. This is the process of “elite overproduction” — too many people competing for a limited number of elite positions, whether that’s Supreme Court justice, business CEO, or whatever.
But as the power of the elites increases, we also have the second dynamic: the poor get poorer, or “popular immiseration.” So the peasants, workers, or common people are also becoming poorer and more frustrated. Suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. increase. This decline in real wages means that it is easier for elites to make more money (labor is now cheaper) so the elites do nothing about it.
This has two results: as the poor get poorer, the “mobilization potential” of the masses increases. Some rabble-rouser, a frustrated counter-elite, will be able to “stir up trouble.” This would not necessarily be left-wing, by the way — Trump is the perfect example of a right-wing counter-elite. Second result, state revenues decline as the tax base shrinks (the poor can’t pay as much in taxes). Therefore, popular immiseration + elite over-production + frustrated counter-elites + weakening state = conflict.
There you have it. The only real solution is to eliminate some of the elites; there are just too many of them. You can do this peacefully, or not so peacefully. You choose. There is a crisis period, with winners and losers among the elite aspirants. The only sure thing is that the number of elites will decrease. This is what we saw during the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the English Civil war, etc.
So where does the environment figure into all this? We think of our social disruption as due to declining environment, peak oil, climate change, etc. Turchin never discusses this in depth in any of his books. It’s too bad, because he could do this in the context of his theory.
It’s really related to “population pressure on resources” — which he does allude to briefly, but then drops the subject in Ages of Discord. He gives the example of 17th century England, where this cycle was stopped due to increasing agricultural productivity. This meant that population could grow, living standards could rise, and NOT result in “popular immiseration” and elite over-production. But now, with environmental decline, peak oil, climate, etc., we have the same process working in reverse. Even with no increase in population, living standards would decline, resulting in lower labor costs (= lower wages!) and rising elite opportunities.
In Turchin’s defense, so far our social disorder seems to be mostly triggered by the inequality dynamic, not the environmental decline dynamic. But still I think he’s missing a key piece which actually supports his theory because environmental decline will actually accelerate the process of social disorder and disintegration. Turchin has done a very good job and let’s hope that he gets the attention he deserves so that we can focus on what, in objective terms, is a vital topic in understanding how we can get to a more peaceful and happy society.
This is well-written and much more understandable for ordinary people than his other books, such as Secular Cycles and Ages of Discord, which were also excellent but very academic. Since we’re currently experiencing a lot of social disruption lately, his analysis is right to the point of much of our current political experience. The upshot, for Turchin, is that inequality as the key driver of social disruption and the potential disintegration of the United States. Turchin’s ideas often echo those of Marx, but he is not a Marxist and in fact approaches the data dispassionately, as a scientist.
There are two things about Turchin’s ideas which stand out. First, the role of the elites in growing inequality; and secondly, the relative absence of environmental issues in our growing crisis.
The elites drive inequality. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But this does NOT mechanically cause a revolution. In fact, the “masses” almost never succeed at a revolution as long as the elites are united, no matter how oppressed they are. To have a revolution, you need to get organized; to get organized, you need resources — but the elites have all the resources. So there are echoes of Lenin, also, who stressed that the masses will never rise up, without a revolutionary party to help out.
It is disaffected elites, not the masses, who propel social disruption. It is inevitable, by the way, that there will be disaffected elites, as Turchin explains. The elites bring about the social crises which he describes. The elites use their power, naturally enough, to get more power and money. So, the rich get richer. So far, so good — for the elites, anyway. Sorry about your declining living standards, oppressed masses. In fact, the oppression of the masses actually HELPS the elites further, because of declining labor costs, and therefore even greater profits.
But this encourages “elite aspirants”— people who are not quite elites, but who are encouraged with all this increasing wealth to imagine themselves as getting in on the action. You, too, could be a millionaire! This is the process of what Turchin calls “elite overproduction.”
This works for a while, but in the long run, this doesn’t work out well for the elites, as you might guess. As the number of elites increase, and more and more people try to get in on the action, many will inevitably fail. So there are also an increasing number of elites, as well as frustrated elites. This is the process of “elite overproduction” — too many people competing for a limited number of elite positions, whether that’s Supreme Court justice, business CEO, or whatever.
But as the power of the elites increases, we also have the second dynamic: the poor get poorer, or “popular immiseration.” So the peasants, workers, or common people are also becoming poorer and more frustrated. Suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. increase. This decline in real wages means that it is easier for elites to make more money (labor is now cheaper) so the elites do nothing about it.
This has two results: as the poor get poorer, the “mobilization potential” of the masses increases. Some rabble-rouser, a frustrated counter-elite, will be able to “stir up trouble.” This would not necessarily be left-wing, by the way — Trump is the perfect example of a right-wing counter-elite. Second result, state revenues decline as the tax base shrinks (the poor can’t pay as much in taxes). Therefore, popular immiseration + elite over-production + frustrated counter-elites + weakening state = conflict.
There you have it. The only real solution is to eliminate some of the elites; there are just too many of them. You can do this peacefully, or not so peacefully. You choose. There is a crisis period, with winners and losers among the elite aspirants. The only sure thing is that the number of elites will decrease. This is what we saw during the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the English Civil war, etc.
So where does the environment figure into all this? We think of our social disruption as due to declining environment, peak oil, climate change, etc. Turchin never discusses this in depth in any of his books. It’s too bad, because he could do this in the context of his theory.
It’s really related to “population pressure on resources” — which he does allude to briefly, but then drops the subject in Ages of Discord. He gives the example of 17th century England, where this cycle was stopped due to increasing agricultural productivity. This meant that population could grow, living standards could rise, and NOT result in “popular immiseration” and elite over-production. But now, with environmental decline, peak oil, climate, etc., we have the same process working in reverse. Even with no increase in population, living standards would decline, resulting in lower labor costs (= lower wages!) and rising elite opportunities.
In Turchin’s defense, so far our social disorder seems to be mostly triggered by the inequality dynamic, not the environmental decline dynamic. But still I think he’s missing a key piece which actually supports his theory because environmental decline will actually accelerate the process of social disorder and disintegration. Turchin has done a very good job and let’s hope that he gets the attention he deserves so that we can focus on what, in objective terms, is a vital topic in understanding how we can get to a more peaceful and happy society.
November 20, 2023
Let's open this review with two Arnold Toynbee quotes. It'll set the mood:
End Times is a laudable attempt to present a science of history. The author, a biologist turned history theorist, Peter Turchin founded a field called cliodynamics. The name of course derives from the Greek goddess of history and heroic poetry, Clio, tacked in front of the study of why things change over time, dynamics. Cliodynamics represents a consilience of cultural evolution (dual-inheritance theory), economic history, macro-sociology (mostly demography), mathematical modeling, and database construction. The field is in its early pre-paradigmatic days, but Turchin contends they've a jump start because of the success in complexity science and cliodynamics is most mature when predicting civilization catastrophes (i.e. collapse).
Turchin then outlines what cliodynamics has taught us about collapse, identifying four primary predictors:
1) Popular immiseration (associated with economic stagnation and income/wealth inequality)
2) Elite overproduction (the most critical factor according to Turchin)
3) Institutional decline (problems of fiscal management, political leg
4) Geopolitic factors (he doesn't discuss these much but presumably these include natural resources, threats to sovereignty from foreign actors, ecological stability, etc)
After highlighting these four factors, he sort of hand waves away the last two largely (these happen to be the primary factors that many geopolitical analysts like Peter Zeihan care about), pointing primarily to popular immiseration and elite overproduction as the forces behind civilizational decline and collapse. Unfortunately, you just have to trust Turchin on these claims. That is, unless you are going to go dig into his publications, which Cliodynamics is its own journal so it's hard for non-experts to judge how broadly accepted such conclusion are. Although I was happy to read his book, I am not currently up for a deep dive into that literature. I'll take on what Turchin presents here, which isn't the most persuasive set of evidence.
To introduce his argument that American is approaching disaster, Turchin presents two fictional composites. One is a reluctant MAGA populist, driven to his populism by a lack of economic opportunity. The other is a scion of the upper slice of the professional-managerial class who exits her trajectory for activism then returns to her elite status as a Yalie law grad despite a committed radical political viewpoint. These composite accompany a reasonable though somewhat misguided economic analysis that claims that the American middle/working class has been taking it on the chin while America's plutocrats live large and/or squabbling over their outsize share of the pie. This is more or less Turchin's version of "that got-darn neoliberal turn ruined the New Deal consensus" nonsense that one typically hears from stereotypical left-wing economists.
This isn't to say there aren't some real things to think about in the analysis or that all of the claims are misguided in some way. However, the Piketty-like contention that we are seeing run-away income and wealth inequality is contradicted by the latest data. We are seeing income stratification on the decline. Moreover, it misses the larger point made by economic historian like Greg Clark that relative social status is fairly constant for long periods of times and the rate of social mobility is fairly low and consistent universally. Subsequently, it seems that paying attention to inequality as a driver of instability appears to miss the forest for the trees. Stagnation, a shrinking or fixed pie of spoils, is the more likely culprit. To state more clearly, inequality becomes a driver of instability when growth and opportunity is low. It is possible to try and make this argument about the United States today, but Turchin doesn't do that. Plus, if one does do this, it invite unfavorable cross-national comparisons. If the U.S. is unstable than its competitors must be even more unstable for the same reasons... This isn't addressed.
Unfortunately, this isn't the worst of the arguments tendered. The primary issue with Turchin's argument, as presented, is that he fails to operationalize and define elite status. How many seats are there in the elite? How do we know we have to many? Have local maxes of elite overproduction ever been navigated stably? We don't get answers to these questions in End Times.
Turchin is more or less aware of these issues in his claims. The implicit definition offered is that a college degree is qualifying. At least most of Turchin's claims about overproduction hang on trends in specific sectors that a tightly linked to higher ed: academia, law, etc. Further, I think few would meaningfully accept such a broad and fuzzy definition of elite. A B.S. in computer science from MIT has a vastly different earning potential and lifestyle than a B.A. in Women's Studies from some unknown liberal arts college or even a business major from a state school. Additionally, a big part of the thesis is about intra-elite competition drive by surplus. It is easy to gesture at trends that fit these ideas nicely and then construct a reasonable theory of how this explains today's America (basically Turchin points to how wokeness functions in prestige institutions), but this is likely to be an "overfit" argument confirmed by subjective feelings. It simply undersamples actual economic data and extrapolates too much. Again, it is possible Turchin has worked these claims out exquisitely with his data and models, but given the valence of his prediction relative to what we know about the reality of today, this seems like a long shot. It also still looks like scientism instead of science.
Ultimately, what I really love about the book is that Turchin has tried to wrestle with the specter of scientism in the project of a science of history. He engage the idea of psychohistory presented by Isaac Asimov in Foundations and the weaknesses of treating human agents as irrelevant. Turchin tries to square the circle of integrating materialist models of history with the Great Man theory, reifying a sort of Tolstoyian vision. A vision that is amenable to useful modeling but where human decisions matter. I think this is a reasonable theoretical view of history, and Turchin presents many interesting models. I just think his predictions are incorrect. I think the 20s will be less tumultuous than the 10s in America and that even the prediction of social unrest in 2020 that Turchin is celebrated for was more bark than bite. I mean relatives the Flyod protests and Jan 6 look like picnic next to the unrest of the 60s and 70s in America and both pale relative to the Civil War.
Ultimately, I think I think End Times deserves a good recommendation because it is a serious work that attempts to do interesting things with the data we have from the past. I'd bet against the predictions of the work and think some of Turchin's assumptions are flawed empirically and theoretically, but learning about cliodynamics is edifying.
Additional Reading
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/10407...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-eli...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-new...
Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.
If we take the antiquity of Man to be something like 300,000 years, then the antiquity of civilizations, so far from being coeval with human history, will be found to cover less than 2 percent of its present span: less than 6,000 years out of 300,000 . On this time-scale , the lives of our twenty-one civilizations-distributed over not more than three generations of societies and concentrated within less than one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of Mankind- must be regarded, on a philosophic view, as contemporary with one another.
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee
End Times is a laudable attempt to present a science of history. The author, a biologist turned history theorist, Peter Turchin founded a field called cliodynamics. The name of course derives from the Greek goddess of history and heroic poetry, Clio, tacked in front of the study of why things change over time, dynamics. Cliodynamics represents a consilience of cultural evolution (dual-inheritance theory), economic history, macro-sociology (mostly demography), mathematical modeling, and database construction. The field is in its early pre-paradigmatic days, but Turchin contends they've a jump start because of the success in complexity science and cliodynamics is most mature when predicting civilization catastrophes (i.e. collapse).
Turchin then outlines what cliodynamics has taught us about collapse, identifying four primary predictors:
1) Popular immiseration (associated with economic stagnation and income/wealth inequality)
2) Elite overproduction (the most critical factor according to Turchin)
3) Institutional decline (problems of fiscal management, political leg
4) Geopolitic factors (he doesn't discuss these much but presumably these include natural resources, threats to sovereignty from foreign actors, ecological stability, etc)
After highlighting these four factors, he sort of hand waves away the last two largely (these happen to be the primary factors that many geopolitical analysts like Peter Zeihan care about), pointing primarily to popular immiseration and elite overproduction as the forces behind civilizational decline and collapse. Unfortunately, you just have to trust Turchin on these claims. That is, unless you are going to go dig into his publications, which Cliodynamics is its own journal so it's hard for non-experts to judge how broadly accepted such conclusion are. Although I was happy to read his book, I am not currently up for a deep dive into that literature. I'll take on what Turchin presents here, which isn't the most persuasive set of evidence.
To introduce his argument that American is approaching disaster, Turchin presents two fictional composites. One is a reluctant MAGA populist, driven to his populism by a lack of economic opportunity. The other is a scion of the upper slice of the professional-managerial class who exits her trajectory for activism then returns to her elite status as a Yalie law grad despite a committed radical political viewpoint. These composite accompany a reasonable though somewhat misguided economic analysis that claims that the American middle/working class has been taking it on the chin while America's plutocrats live large and/or squabbling over their outsize share of the pie. This is more or less Turchin's version of "that got-darn neoliberal turn ruined the New Deal consensus" nonsense that one typically hears from stereotypical left-wing economists.
This isn't to say there aren't some real things to think about in the analysis or that all of the claims are misguided in some way. However, the Piketty-like contention that we are seeing run-away income and wealth inequality is contradicted by the latest data. We are seeing income stratification on the decline. Moreover, it misses the larger point made by economic historian like Greg Clark that relative social status is fairly constant for long periods of times and the rate of social mobility is fairly low and consistent universally. Subsequently, it seems that paying attention to inequality as a driver of instability appears to miss the forest for the trees. Stagnation, a shrinking or fixed pie of spoils, is the more likely culprit. To state more clearly, inequality becomes a driver of instability when growth and opportunity is low. It is possible to try and make this argument about the United States today, but Turchin doesn't do that. Plus, if one does do this, it invite unfavorable cross-national comparisons. If the U.S. is unstable than its competitors must be even more unstable for the same reasons... This isn't addressed.
Unfortunately, this isn't the worst of the arguments tendered. The primary issue with Turchin's argument, as presented, is that he fails to operationalize and define elite status. How many seats are there in the elite? How do we know we have to many? Have local maxes of elite overproduction ever been navigated stably? We don't get answers to these questions in End Times.
Turchin is more or less aware of these issues in his claims. The implicit definition offered is that a college degree is qualifying. At least most of Turchin's claims about overproduction hang on trends in specific sectors that a tightly linked to higher ed: academia, law, etc. Further, I think few would meaningfully accept such a broad and fuzzy definition of elite. A B.S. in computer science from MIT has a vastly different earning potential and lifestyle than a B.A. in Women's Studies from some unknown liberal arts college or even a business major from a state school. Additionally, a big part of the thesis is about intra-elite competition drive by surplus. It is easy to gesture at trends that fit these ideas nicely and then construct a reasonable theory of how this explains today's America (basically Turchin points to how wokeness functions in prestige institutions), but this is likely to be an "overfit" argument confirmed by subjective feelings. It simply undersamples actual economic data and extrapolates too much. Again, it is possible Turchin has worked these claims out exquisitely with his data and models, but given the valence of his prediction relative to what we know about the reality of today, this seems like a long shot. It also still looks like scientism instead of science.
Ultimately, what I really love about the book is that Turchin has tried to wrestle with the specter of scientism in the project of a science of history. He engage the idea of psychohistory presented by Isaac Asimov in Foundations and the weaknesses of treating human agents as irrelevant. Turchin tries to square the circle of integrating materialist models of history with the Great Man theory, reifying a sort of Tolstoyian vision. A vision that is amenable to useful modeling but where human decisions matter. I think this is a reasonable theoretical view of history, and Turchin presents many interesting models. I just think his predictions are incorrect. I think the 20s will be less tumultuous than the 10s in America and that even the prediction of social unrest in 2020 that Turchin is celebrated for was more bark than bite. I mean relatives the Flyod protests and Jan 6 look like picnic next to the unrest of the 60s and 70s in America and both pale relative to the Civil War.
Ultimately, I think I think End Times deserves a good recommendation because it is a serious work that attempts to do interesting things with the data we have from the past. I'd bet against the predictions of the work and think some of Turchin's assumptions are flawed empirically and theoretically, but learning about cliodynamics is edifying.
Additional Reading
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/10407...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-eli...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-new...
August 14, 2023
Mehhhh!
En corto. Cuando emergen de un sistema social, constantemente actualizado, individuos élites pero no hay suficientes “lugares” de poder los cuales puedan ocupar, o sea, es más la demanda de estos lugares que la oferta, entonces, se causa una sobrepoblación específica donde, debido a las inevitables peleas por esas plazas, por individuos o grupos élite, el mundo se convierte en una pugna encarnizada sí o sí. Estas élites son las que cambian, para bien o para mal, a la sociedad entera.
Este cambio y forma de llegar a ser élite (o un grupo con poder) es extremadamente agresivo y sus movimientos, a los ojos de los de menor jerarquía (que se lleguen a enterar), hacen que los califiquen como violentos, sanguinarios, malvados, siniestrillos y hasta místicos wu-wu, etc, pues todo lo que hacen y causan es impersonal para toda la estructura jerárquica que crean y “acarrean” mientras se encuentren en la máxima posición. La forma en que esto se vuelve muy personal es cuando estás en el mismo nivel social pero tienes un rival, todo lo demás, como está mencionado en el libro, es impersonal, haciendo que toda la estructura del sistema haga que la mayoría ni sepa, en verdad, por qué hace lo que hace para sobrevivir (tener/hacer su sentido diario). Ejemplos hay muchísimos pero de bote pronto, estos… tú piensas que las decisiones “racionales” y “educadas” que formaste y “has tomado” en tu mentecilla “actualizada” (hehehe) de 1. “no voy a tener hijos en esta época” o 2. “escoger pareja” o 3. criar a tu hijo “de la mejor manera” o 4. "Escoger profesión” o 5. "defender lo que más quieres" o 6. “me gustan más los perros” ¿son realmente tuyas?... en donde lo opuesto (o variaciones) de cada uno de estos ejemplillos al sistema le resulta LO MISMO, no cambia el resultado de producción mientras te venda$, nos vendamo$ y consumamo$ dentro de mercados (más su carga ideológica, que es, en sí, lo que nos proporciona sentido sobre “todo lo posiblemente comprensible (consumible)”, lo cual, en éstas épocas: es nuestra demanda de/por consumo. Consumo ¿de qué? ah pues de TODO “lo mejor” percibido por las élites donde habitas (que son las que te ofrecen lo que consumes) lo cual hace que tú desees lo mismo pero en esteróides, lo cual causa una estructura peor que poseer, el desear es mucho más ughh!, cómo decirlo, profundo que el hecho de tener/ser, desear corroe más en un estado sin control que controlado, siendo así la venta y consumo de nosotros mismos y nuestro output, lo que nos hace caer en el territorio controlado(able) (no es que sea completamente malo, pero, si lo ves así, ya no se espera nada de ti más allá de tu output y consumo regular, tu tan planeada “vida adulta”). Sheeesh, de hecho, crees que esta mentecilla que te acompaña y “te hace escoger” (hahaha) entre el espectro que te "has" formado del bien y el mal ¿es tuya, tuya-tuya? hahahaha.
(NOTA: De cierta manera, ¡ojalá y pienses en el fondo que sí eres dueño absoluto de tu mente! porque eso te evita problemas internos y externos que al menos te pueden hacer sentir vértigo. Aveces siento que ser (o hacerse) idiota-correoso es una ventaja anti-cancerígena o al menos, anti-suicida en la actualidad, si es que no has desarrollado una adicción antes para al menos mantenerte “sano/sana” VS tu día-a-día.
Esta necesidad de ser adicto a una variedad innovadora de “cosas” (ofrecidas por el mercado) tanto en los que se drogan diariamente en las coladeras como los que se drogan en un malls brillosos comprando “calzones” de $10,000 USD los fines de semana en diferentes culturas. El de la coladera como el del mall una vez tienen la adicción y se auto convencen de que lo que hacen es justificado (no la adicción, sino lo que la hace emerger, hehe, el día-a-día) entonces: ¡todo va bien! Lo que está mal no es el consumo sino cuando ya liberas dopamina de adicción para “estar bien” porque, tal vez, sólo, tal vez, en el fondo, ya no hay/tienes significado verdadero o una estructura correcta la cual te permite superar cualquier mercado, moda, cultura, lenguaje o dolor.
Es necesaria mucha más humildad para reconocer que (intentando hacer una comparación) no eres ni el dueño “del mercado”, ni de “la carnicería”, ni de “la carne” que ahí se expone, vende y fija sobre ti un precio que parece siempre inferior a lo que crees que vales, pero de hecho no, sólo respondes al mercado donde habitas y a la carne que tú mismo comes. No es malo ni bueno… es. Hay unos quienes comen lo mejor de lo mejor (y más tierno, spooky, dependiendo el contexto) y otros que comen lo necesario a como “su” día-a-día les exige, la diferencia entre estos dos polos es brutal socialmente y, se potencializa porque no importa la situación en que te encuentres pues, deseas más permanentemente o al menos conservar el mejor de los infiernos. En éste ejemplo y espectro, hay unos que ni carne comen y mueren más rápido o hay lugares en donde se imprime “carne artificial de soya”, o unos que inventan estados mentales, para “habitar” en ellos y negar convenientemente que tienen un cuerpo con necesidades programadas específicas (ADN, epigenética) que les hacen comer "carne" quieran, o no.
¡Hey! Al menos, entre otros, no muchos, pero, los artistas (derivado de la palabra Arte y no fama) y los comediantes (de nuevo, no famosos, sino Artistas) se salvan de esta pugna/cambio social de las élites y, mientras producen el arte (emergente de la propia percepción de la sociedad en que habitan), sobre aquello que observan, o posan su consciencia, se salvan por unos momentos a ellos mismos y, con ellos, a todos los que pueden acceder a la perspectiva de su arte, de su talento, mientras se expone. Me acordé de George Carlin, de Caravaggio, Bach, Huxley y otros que son lo suficientemente sensibles para señalar dolores y sus 10,000 máscaras.
Regresando, qué flojera escuchar, una vez más, de todo esto… pero bueno, alguien tiene que hacerlo (que bueno que no soy yo)... a grandes rasgos, antes era el esclavo/feudal, después “el proletariado” (esto ha tenido muchos nombres siempre, depende la élite emergente de la cultura dominante se decide quien es “el bueno” o “malo” para sus intenciones cambiantes) y ahora, en estos tiempos, “ya se dieron cuenta”, hahaha, que “son (de hecho) las élites y sus cambios” uuuuuu que mieeeedo, hahahaha, en sí, la humanidad como una parte del fractal evolutivo al que puede ser conciente de, al que corresponde (sistemas donde interactúa en su complejidad) sólo pueden hacer que nos comportemos conforme a nuestra naturaleza más básica representada y actuada en nuestros modelillos de percepción/acción (de un animal social: cultura) en cualquier época, algo así como, devora lo que te nutre, acumula sin pensarlo dos veces y reprodúcete cuantas veces puedas little bunny (causando el orden social y competencias emergentes de siempre), si te das cuenta de esta verdad que pre-condiciona nuestra propia existencia, una verdad absoluta, entonces, inmediatamente verás que como casi nadie sabe siquiera la diferencia entre 1. qué es apto para “comer” y qué no, o 2. cómo puedo alimentarme, y acumular, en una sociedad del 2023 si sólo soy un humano más, con el fin de reproducirme, entonces, a) SI ERES élite, puedes decidir quién se puede sentar a tu mesa y crear una “casa”, con todo lo que necesitas para los que habitan ahí puedan lograr todo y la “defiendan” el élite se hace de lealtad adherida (esbirros), hasta que alguien, interno o foráneo no le gusten tus pareceres y/o encuentre algo más “nutritivo” (mejor), lo administre socializando con los que mejor le caen y entonces b)la “mesa” va a intentar cambiarse a una “nueva casa” (frente a tus ojos) a lo cual se responde con agresividad a.k.a. mismos juegos de siempre... ad infinitum donde, debido a esta naturaleza primigenia, estamos obligados a encerrarnos en un loop de sentidos de sin-sentidos, de defensivas y ofensivas brutales, en donde, todo se justifica si se ve desde la perspectiva social más primordial, algo así como... cualquier individuo, de mí misma clase, habitante de este sistema, es alguien “bueno” hasta que “brinca” a un nivel de élite superior, entonces se puede negociar su bondad dependiendo de cómo me beneficia personalmente. Repito, los que están en tu “clase” son “los buenos”… los de “arriba” de ti son “malos” y “místicos” (a los que hay que quitar) y los que están “abajo” bueno, más te vale siempre y por default que los consideres como mártires sin nombre (una vez que “subes”), jajajajaja, si es que quieres que no te apaleen (más bien, devoren) cuando estés “sobre” ellos porque, claro está, como regla no escrita… si estás arriba… “es por mi y todos nosotros” (dirían ellos), hahahaha, y tarde o temprano, van a querer cobrarlo de la forma en que “el mercado” se entiende más fácilmente: devorar la “carne mala” justificado por los ojos de todos. Ooof, cuidado con todo esto, porque todos estamos jugando (tu hermano, tu tío, tu vecino, el financiero, el guerrero, tu madre, etc) a que no tenemos hambre y, de hecho "nunca la tuvimos" y por este pensamiento diariamente (muchos) mueren y muchos otros, de hecho, ni han venido a nacer cuando en sí tenía que haber sucedido. Bueno, en sí, ¿quién soy yo para pensar estas cosas?
Como humanidad nos hemos dado cuenta de esto en el pasado y ha quedado como advertencia en nuestra cultura oral, literatura y demás artes en todos lados ya que son Verdades que se han observado desde la antigüedad, eso no significa caducas, sino que son válidas aquí y también mañana. Dentro de este contexto, hace sentido algo como lo siguiente, fuera de promover religiones:
Mateo 22:39
"Y el segundo es semejante: Amarás a tu prójimo como a ti mismo."
En comparación lo que se practica ahora es:
“La familia, es primero.” (No wonder).
Amor verdadero por todo, sin influencias, prejuicios, sin pre-programación comercial más que tu corazón (si es que lo llegas a conocer, a tu corazón), bueno... eso es tan raro pero, TAN RARO... que de verdad se ve menos que una estrella fugaz y lo más seguro es que nunca lo veas porque no sabemos ni quién, ni lo que somos.
Continuando, el ser élite comienza en la inocencia de una familia sana y con un espectro inocente, hasta que emerge el contacto con su naturaleza social y pierde (bye, bye innocence), con esto, al inicio… si puedes retener en la cabeza que puedes “tener/ser” algo que te causará mejoría, una vez que lo logres (esperanza), entonces, ya comenzaste, muchos nunca llegaron a tener siquiera eso, así, automáticamente están excluidos de la competencia, nunca podrían participar en ninguna jerarquía de sentido social (poder) porque ni siquiera la comprenden, vienen a servir. La esperanza es el principio de esto donde pareciera inofensiva y deseable, pero, de esta manera y más rápido que lento, se va manifestando, como ponía antes, su naturaleza, donde repentinamente te encontrarás con que querrás retener los frutos de la esperanza (y no la esperanza en sí misma: inocencia) todo el tiempo que puedas con las personas más allegadas y queridas (adheridos). Ahora, si esta posición social la has mantenido por generaciones significa que sabes tener relaciones con los iguales a tí dentro de tu cultura, los superiores y los inferiores, cosa muy difícil de lograr, has mantenido positivamente relaciones con los superiores haciéndoles “creer” que no les harás nada, a los “inferiores” haciéndoles creer que “no te alimentas de ellos” y a los que son iguales que tú… bueno, con esos son los que practicas los 7 pecados capitales (que estén de moda en tu cultura) para unirse en un ethos de “igualdad” y “hermandad”, haha! estabilidad y neutralidad.
¡Hay, ya!… blah-blah-blah... se puede decir tanto de esto.
Es más rápido estudiar acerca de primates, los chimpancés son sorprendentes y súper parecidos a nosotros, después Maquiavelo y después guerra, poder, psicología y sociología. Lo demás como mi apunte y éste mismo libro intenta hacer es blah-blah-blah de Bar, blah-blah-blah de opiniones educadas o de “modelos ultra avanzados y predictivos de think-tanks”... en fin, como dije, todo sucumbe siempre a la realidad, no hay computadora o interpretación que pueda reproducir para re-interpretar, mediante observaciones profesionales a la realidad misma, o repitiéndolo todo y más fácil: blah-blah-blah.
Punto final, los que tratan de hacer sentido de todo esto, generalmente, son fatalistas… me desesperan mucho porque siempre según ellos no podríamos haber llegado a donde estamos de ninguna manera (dígase el espectro total de Estados Unidos de América en el mundo (que va más allá que el contorno del país)) con todo y sus fallas. Por qué digo esto, porque algo que sí tengo seguro es no querer, de nuevo, algún emperador, de ningún tipo ni de ninguna religión, eso es regresar a algo mucho peor pero con poderes inimaginables (fusión/fisión del átomo, alteración del ADN e inteligencia artificial) si la tenemos difícil ahora, ésto, pero con un sistema social más primitivo sería una muerte masiva segura.
Citas:
1.
“Although not everybody has ambition to acquire more power, there are always more aspirants than power positions.”
NOTA:
-A lo que digo, no ambición… pero sí envidia: el copy/paste de la creación de algo y renombrarlo a tu conveniencia (John Milton y su Paradise Lost pueden aclarar mucho esto que quiero exponer).
-Las escuelas no fueron lo mismo pre-segunda guerra mundial, y post-segunda guerra mundial aunque la pregunta a las élites, para las dos épocas, sería ¿qué “individuos” querían producir en su sociedad? Y, como siempre, la Verdad (qué es a lo que se debería apuntar en cada clase, para cada individuo, nos la cepillamos según quien esté diseñando la perpetuidad (acumulación) de la élite de su pueblo, en donde, no sólo es cuidadosamente programado el sistema para ubicarte en una fábrica, los que lo “viven” (los de abajo) lo van a defender a muerte pues es SU ethos, hahahaha, sin eso no tienen nada (no sabrían ni qué comer).
2.
“In game theory, a branch of mathematics that studies strategic interactions, the players must devise winning strategies within
the given rules. But in real life, people bend rules all the time.”
NOTA: Cheating.
3.
“Immiserated masses generate raw energy, while a cadre of counter-elites provides an organization to channel that energy against the ruling class.”
NOTA:
-Esta es “la chance” de subir, o provocar “tu subida”, si es que la ves, se te deja ver y estar participando en ello.
-Actualmente, eres counter-elite si tienes, haces y has hecho todo lo que un élite, pero no “se te asignó” un lugar de poder, entonces… porque “divinamente” has pagado lo que se tiene que pagar para acceder a “lo mejor de lo mejor” (definido por la sociedad que te formó) pelearás/an por ese “derecho divino” (de hecho no hay escapatoria) y eso te hace inmediatamente un counter-elite. También puedes dar un golpe de estado de cualquier tipo, en cualquier momento, y cosas similares dependiendo de la creatividad del que quiera hacerse con el poder, pero en general, los counter emergen de la misma élite.
4.
“As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition, in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper tiers of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic—or sleazy—efforts don’t guarantee a superior edge.”
5.
Una de las cosas MÁS IMPORTANTES A ENTENDER, no se ve ni siquiera en este libro, es la siguiente cita y el fondo de ella. No la escuche de Turchin sino de Eric Weinstein:
“This social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. As a consequence, typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Worse, real wages stagnated and at times even decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for most of the American population.”
NOTA: Con esto el mundo puede ver su suerte ya que es el copy/paste de lo que sucede en el West (principalmente Estados Unidos) pero en pirata.
Ahhh… se me olvidaba, a todo esto sumándole que somos individuos emocionales y que respondemos mejor al amor que a otra cosa conocida artificial o no artificial, de verdad estamos metidos en un problemota muy triste.
Todo eso más que estamos a la víspera de:
- Inteligencia Artificial (✓) esto provoca una singularidad... lástima que el término no sea comprendido en su acepción de física, repito, una s.i.n.g.u.l.a.r.i.d.a.d. (qué miedo).
- Pinshis aliens (✓)
- Cambios climáticos extremos, julio 2023 estuvo de la sh*t, (✓)
- Todavía les falta describir la Nada y cuando te asalta, en mushishi lo describen bien pero tampoco saben qué es.
- Las migraciones masivas (✓).
- Extremismos (✓)
- Alteración del ciclo del agua (✓)
- Intensificación del Niño y la Niña, haciendo que las corrientes marítimas se alteren (✓)
- Haberle dado cuchillos a los niños con Internet (✓)
- Sociedades que apoyan, racional o irracionalmente, aquellas pre-condiciones que causan al final del día: Guerra, revueltas o discordias en el sistema (✓)
- Corrupción (✓)(✓)
- Problemas con el abastecimiento de alimentos y fertilizantes (✓)
- Moral Warriors de radicalismos de moda (✓)(✓)
- Desempleo (✓)
- Meaning Crisis (✓)
- Tráfico de humanos, especialmente infantes (✓)(✓)
- Recordar que todo lo objetivo, de toda esta lista (y los millones de puntos que faltan), emergió de la subjetividad humana, economía, política, geografía, complejidad... nuestra mentecilla es la que crea todo esto ANTES de que pase en la “realidad” o lo que eso signifique, a lo que voy es que Tenemos jodido el cerebro en nuestras culturas debido a cómo nos hemos conducido y una vez que entra a nuestro campo de consciencia y le damos tiempo de pensamiento diario… pues check (✓)
-----------
Ah, para más fácil, si no se sabe reconocer al mal eterno existente, que actúa sobre todo pues es
"nuestra" naturaleza (si no se combate), éste post de Scott Alexander y el video, que es lo mismo, lo describen excelentemente o, al menos, te lo aclara. De esto lo que me da miedo es que hay muchos que les tienes que decir "¡NO VEAS EL DEDO! ¡VE LO QUE SEÑALA EL DEDO! : ¡LA LUNA!" y de todas formas te van a decir "sí, ya veo... ¡la lúnula!, yo también teeeengooooo".
(Antes de esto si se puede leer historia de la economía, ¡qué mejor!)
Love (forgiveness) and charity.
En corto. Cuando emergen de un sistema social, constantemente actualizado, individuos élites pero no hay suficientes “lugares” de poder los cuales puedan ocupar, o sea, es más la demanda de estos lugares que la oferta, entonces, se causa una sobrepoblación específica donde, debido a las inevitables peleas por esas plazas, por individuos o grupos élite, el mundo se convierte en una pugna encarnizada sí o sí. Estas élites son las que cambian, para bien o para mal, a la sociedad entera.
Este cambio y forma de llegar a ser élite (o un grupo con poder) es extremadamente agresivo y sus movimientos, a los ojos de los de menor jerarquía (que se lleguen a enterar), hacen que los califiquen como violentos, sanguinarios, malvados, siniestrillos y hasta místicos wu-wu, etc, pues todo lo que hacen y causan es impersonal para toda la estructura jerárquica que crean y “acarrean” mientras se encuentren en la máxima posición. La forma en que esto se vuelve muy personal es cuando estás en el mismo nivel social pero tienes un rival, todo lo demás, como está mencionado en el libro, es impersonal, haciendo que toda la estructura del sistema haga que la mayoría ni sepa, en verdad, por qué hace lo que hace para sobrevivir (tener/hacer su sentido diario). Ejemplos hay muchísimos pero de bote pronto, estos… tú piensas que las decisiones “racionales” y “educadas” que formaste y “has tomado” en tu mentecilla “actualizada” (hehehe) de 1. “no voy a tener hijos en esta época” o 2. “escoger pareja” o 3. criar a tu hijo “de la mejor manera” o 4. "Escoger profesión” o 5. "defender lo que más quieres" o 6. “me gustan más los perros” ¿son realmente tuyas?... en donde lo opuesto (o variaciones) de cada uno de estos ejemplillos al sistema le resulta LO MISMO, no cambia el resultado de producción mientras te venda$, nos vendamo$ y consumamo$ dentro de mercados (más su carga ideológica, que es, en sí, lo que nos proporciona sentido sobre “todo lo posiblemente comprensible (consumible)”, lo cual, en éstas épocas: es nuestra demanda de/por consumo. Consumo ¿de qué? ah pues de TODO “lo mejor” percibido por las élites donde habitas (que son las que te ofrecen lo que consumes) lo cual hace que tú desees lo mismo pero en esteróides, lo cual causa una estructura peor que poseer, el desear es mucho más ughh!, cómo decirlo, profundo que el hecho de tener/ser, desear corroe más en un estado sin control que controlado, siendo así la venta y consumo de nosotros mismos y nuestro output, lo que nos hace caer en el territorio controlado(able) (no es que sea completamente malo, pero, si lo ves así, ya no se espera nada de ti más allá de tu output y consumo regular, tu tan planeada “vida adulta”). Sheeesh, de hecho, crees que esta mentecilla que te acompaña y “te hace escoger” (hahaha) entre el espectro que te "has" formado del bien y el mal ¿es tuya, tuya-tuya? hahahaha.
(NOTA: De cierta manera, ¡ojalá y pienses en el fondo que sí eres dueño absoluto de tu mente! porque eso te evita problemas internos y externos que al menos te pueden hacer sentir vértigo. Aveces siento que ser (o hacerse) idiota-correoso es una ventaja anti-cancerígena o al menos, anti-suicida en la actualidad, si es que no has desarrollado una adicción antes para al menos mantenerte “sano/sana” VS tu día-a-día.
Esta necesidad de ser adicto a una variedad innovadora de “cosas” (ofrecidas por el mercado) tanto en los que se drogan diariamente en las coladeras como los que se drogan en un malls brillosos comprando “calzones” de $10,000 USD los fines de semana en diferentes culturas. El de la coladera como el del mall una vez tienen la adicción y se auto convencen de que lo que hacen es justificado (no la adicción, sino lo que la hace emerger, hehe, el día-a-día) entonces: ¡todo va bien! Lo que está mal no es el consumo sino cuando ya liberas dopamina de adicción para “estar bien” porque, tal vez, sólo, tal vez, en el fondo, ya no hay/tienes significado verdadero o una estructura correcta la cual te permite superar cualquier mercado, moda, cultura, lenguaje o dolor.
Es necesaria mucha más humildad para reconocer que (intentando hacer una comparación) no eres ni el dueño “del mercado”, ni de “la carnicería”, ni de “la carne” que ahí se expone, vende y fija sobre ti un precio que parece siempre inferior a lo que crees que vales, pero de hecho no, sólo respondes al mercado donde habitas y a la carne que tú mismo comes. No es malo ni bueno… es. Hay unos quienes comen lo mejor de lo mejor (y más tierno, spooky, dependiendo el contexto) y otros que comen lo necesario a como “su” día-a-día les exige, la diferencia entre estos dos polos es brutal socialmente y, se potencializa porque no importa la situación en que te encuentres pues, deseas más permanentemente o al menos conservar el mejor de los infiernos. En éste ejemplo y espectro, hay unos que ni carne comen y mueren más rápido o hay lugares en donde se imprime “carne artificial de soya”, o unos que inventan estados mentales, para “habitar” en ellos y negar convenientemente que tienen un cuerpo con necesidades programadas específicas (ADN, epigenética) que les hacen comer "carne" quieran, o no.
¡Hey! Al menos, entre otros, no muchos, pero, los artistas (derivado de la palabra Arte y no fama) y los comediantes (de nuevo, no famosos, sino Artistas) se salvan de esta pugna/cambio social de las élites y, mientras producen el arte (emergente de la propia percepción de la sociedad en que habitan), sobre aquello que observan, o posan su consciencia, se salvan por unos momentos a ellos mismos y, con ellos, a todos los que pueden acceder a la perspectiva de su arte, de su talento, mientras se expone. Me acordé de George Carlin, de Caravaggio, Bach, Huxley y otros que son lo suficientemente sensibles para señalar dolores y sus 10,000 máscaras.
Regresando, qué flojera escuchar, una vez más, de todo esto… pero bueno, alguien tiene que hacerlo (que bueno que no soy yo)... a grandes rasgos, antes era el esclavo/feudal, después “el proletariado” (esto ha tenido muchos nombres siempre, depende la élite emergente de la cultura dominante se decide quien es “el bueno” o “malo” para sus intenciones cambiantes) y ahora, en estos tiempos, “ya se dieron cuenta”, hahaha, que “son (de hecho) las élites y sus cambios” uuuuuu que mieeeedo, hahahaha, en sí, la humanidad como una parte del fractal evolutivo al que puede ser conciente de, al que corresponde (sistemas donde interactúa en su complejidad) sólo pueden hacer que nos comportemos conforme a nuestra naturaleza más básica representada y actuada en nuestros modelillos de percepción/acción (de un animal social: cultura) en cualquier época, algo así como, devora lo que te nutre, acumula sin pensarlo dos veces y reprodúcete cuantas veces puedas little bunny (causando el orden social y competencias emergentes de siempre), si te das cuenta de esta verdad que pre-condiciona nuestra propia existencia, una verdad absoluta, entonces, inmediatamente verás que como casi nadie sabe siquiera la diferencia entre 1. qué es apto para “comer” y qué no, o 2. cómo puedo alimentarme, y acumular, en una sociedad del 2023 si sólo soy un humano más, con el fin de reproducirme, entonces, a) SI ERES élite, puedes decidir quién se puede sentar a tu mesa y crear una “casa”, con todo lo que necesitas para los que habitan ahí puedan lograr todo y la “defiendan” el élite se hace de lealtad adherida (esbirros), hasta que alguien, interno o foráneo no le gusten tus pareceres y/o encuentre algo más “nutritivo” (mejor), lo administre socializando con los que mejor le caen y entonces b)la “mesa” va a intentar cambiarse a una “nueva casa” (frente a tus ojos) a lo cual se responde con agresividad a.k.a. mismos juegos de siempre... ad infinitum donde, debido a esta naturaleza primigenia, estamos obligados a encerrarnos en un loop de sentidos de sin-sentidos, de defensivas y ofensivas brutales, en donde, todo se justifica si se ve desde la perspectiva social más primordial, algo así como... cualquier individuo, de mí misma clase, habitante de este sistema, es alguien “bueno” hasta que “brinca” a un nivel de élite superior, entonces se puede negociar su bondad dependiendo de cómo me beneficia personalmente. Repito, los que están en tu “clase” son “los buenos”… los de “arriba” de ti son “malos” y “místicos” (a los que hay que quitar) y los que están “abajo” bueno, más te vale siempre y por default que los consideres como mártires sin nombre (una vez que “subes”), jajajajaja, si es que quieres que no te apaleen (más bien, devoren) cuando estés “sobre” ellos porque, claro está, como regla no escrita… si estás arriba… “es por mi y todos nosotros” (dirían ellos), hahahaha, y tarde o temprano, van a querer cobrarlo de la forma en que “el mercado” se entiende más fácilmente: devorar la “carne mala” justificado por los ojos de todos. Ooof, cuidado con todo esto, porque todos estamos jugando (tu hermano, tu tío, tu vecino, el financiero, el guerrero, tu madre, etc) a que no tenemos hambre y, de hecho "nunca la tuvimos" y por este pensamiento diariamente (muchos) mueren y muchos otros, de hecho, ni han venido a nacer cuando en sí tenía que haber sucedido. Bueno, en sí, ¿quién soy yo para pensar estas cosas?
Como humanidad nos hemos dado cuenta de esto en el pasado y ha quedado como advertencia en nuestra cultura oral, literatura y demás artes en todos lados ya que son Verdades que se han observado desde la antigüedad, eso no significa caducas, sino que son válidas aquí y también mañana. Dentro de este contexto, hace sentido algo como lo siguiente, fuera de promover religiones:
Mateo 22:39
"Y el segundo es semejante: Amarás a tu prójimo como a ti mismo."
En comparación lo que se practica ahora es:
“La familia, es primero.” (No wonder).
Amor verdadero por todo, sin influencias, prejuicios, sin pre-programación comercial más que tu corazón (si es que lo llegas a conocer, a tu corazón), bueno... eso es tan raro pero, TAN RARO... que de verdad se ve menos que una estrella fugaz y lo más seguro es que nunca lo veas porque no sabemos ni quién, ni lo que somos.
Continuando, el ser élite comienza en la inocencia de una familia sana y con un espectro inocente, hasta que emerge el contacto con su naturaleza social y pierde (bye, bye innocence), con esto, al inicio… si puedes retener en la cabeza que puedes “tener/ser” algo que te causará mejoría, una vez que lo logres (esperanza), entonces, ya comenzaste, muchos nunca llegaron a tener siquiera eso, así, automáticamente están excluidos de la competencia, nunca podrían participar en ninguna jerarquía de sentido social (poder) porque ni siquiera la comprenden, vienen a servir. La esperanza es el principio de esto donde pareciera inofensiva y deseable, pero, de esta manera y más rápido que lento, se va manifestando, como ponía antes, su naturaleza, donde repentinamente te encontrarás con que querrás retener los frutos de la esperanza (y no la esperanza en sí misma: inocencia) todo el tiempo que puedas con las personas más allegadas y queridas (adheridos). Ahora, si esta posición social la has mantenido por generaciones significa que sabes tener relaciones con los iguales a tí dentro de tu cultura, los superiores y los inferiores, cosa muy difícil de lograr, has mantenido positivamente relaciones con los superiores haciéndoles “creer” que no les harás nada, a los “inferiores” haciéndoles creer que “no te alimentas de ellos” y a los que son iguales que tú… bueno, con esos son los que practicas los 7 pecados capitales (que estén de moda en tu cultura) para unirse en un ethos de “igualdad” y “hermandad”, haha! estabilidad y neutralidad.
¡Hay, ya!… blah-blah-blah... se puede decir tanto de esto.
Es más rápido estudiar acerca de primates, los chimpancés son sorprendentes y súper parecidos a nosotros, después Maquiavelo y después guerra, poder, psicología y sociología. Lo demás como mi apunte y éste mismo libro intenta hacer es blah-blah-blah de Bar, blah-blah-blah de opiniones educadas o de “modelos ultra avanzados y predictivos de think-tanks”... en fin, como dije, todo sucumbe siempre a la realidad, no hay computadora o interpretación que pueda reproducir para re-interpretar, mediante observaciones profesionales a la realidad misma, o repitiéndolo todo y más fácil: blah-blah-blah.
Punto final, los que tratan de hacer sentido de todo esto, generalmente, son fatalistas… me desesperan mucho porque siempre según ellos no podríamos haber llegado a donde estamos de ninguna manera (dígase el espectro total de Estados Unidos de América en el mundo (que va más allá que el contorno del país)) con todo y sus fallas. Por qué digo esto, porque algo que sí tengo seguro es no querer, de nuevo, algún emperador, de ningún tipo ni de ninguna religión, eso es regresar a algo mucho peor pero con poderes inimaginables (fusión/fisión del átomo, alteración del ADN e inteligencia artificial) si la tenemos difícil ahora, ésto, pero con un sistema social más primitivo sería una muerte masiva segura.
Citas:
1.
“Although not everybody has ambition to acquire more power, there are always more aspirants than power positions.”
NOTA:
-A lo que digo, no ambición… pero sí envidia: el copy/paste de la creación de algo y renombrarlo a tu conveniencia (John Milton y su Paradise Lost pueden aclarar mucho esto que quiero exponer).
-Las escuelas no fueron lo mismo pre-segunda guerra mundial, y post-segunda guerra mundial aunque la pregunta a las élites, para las dos épocas, sería ¿qué “individuos” querían producir en su sociedad? Y, como siempre, la Verdad (qué es a lo que se debería apuntar en cada clase, para cada individuo, nos la cepillamos según quien esté diseñando la perpetuidad (acumulación) de la élite de su pueblo, en donde, no sólo es cuidadosamente programado el sistema para ubicarte en una fábrica, los que lo “viven” (los de abajo) lo van a defender a muerte pues es SU ethos, hahahaha, sin eso no tienen nada (no sabrían ni qué comer).
2.
“In game theory, a branch of mathematics that studies strategic interactions, the players must devise winning strategies within
the given rules. But in real life, people bend rules all the time.”
NOTA: Cheating.
3.
“Immiserated masses generate raw energy, while a cadre of counter-elites provides an organization to channel that energy against the ruling class.”
NOTA:
-Esta es “la chance” de subir, o provocar “tu subida”, si es que la ves, se te deja ver y estar participando en ello.
-Actualmente, eres counter-elite si tienes, haces y has hecho todo lo que un élite, pero no “se te asignó” un lugar de poder, entonces… porque “divinamente” has pagado lo que se tiene que pagar para acceder a “lo mejor de lo mejor” (definido por la sociedad que te formó) pelearás/an por ese “derecho divino” (de hecho no hay escapatoria) y eso te hace inmediatamente un counter-elite. También puedes dar un golpe de estado de cualquier tipo, en cualquier momento, y cosas similares dependiendo de la creatividad del que quiera hacerse con el poder, pero en general, los counter emergen de la misma élite.
4.
“As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition, in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper tiers of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic—or sleazy—efforts don’t guarantee a superior edge.”
5.
Una de las cosas MÁS IMPORTANTES A ENTENDER, no se ve ni siquiera en este libro, es la siguiente cita y el fondo de ella. No la escuche de Turchin sino de Eric Weinstein:
“This social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. As a consequence, typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Worse, real wages stagnated and at times even decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for most of the American population.”
NOTA: Con esto el mundo puede ver su suerte ya que es el copy/paste de lo que sucede en el West (principalmente Estados Unidos) pero en pirata.
Ahhh… se me olvidaba, a todo esto sumándole que somos individuos emocionales y que respondemos mejor al amor que a otra cosa conocida artificial o no artificial, de verdad estamos metidos en un problemota muy triste.
Todo eso más que estamos a la víspera de:
- Inteligencia Artificial (✓) esto provoca una singularidad... lástima que el término no sea comprendido en su acepción de física, repito, una s.i.n.g.u.l.a.r.i.d.a.d. (qué miedo).
- Pinshis aliens (✓)
- Cambios climáticos extremos, julio 2023 estuvo de la sh*t, (✓)
- Todavía les falta describir la Nada y cuando te asalta, en mushishi lo describen bien pero tampoco saben qué es.
- Las migraciones masivas (✓).
- Extremismos (✓)
- Alteración del ciclo del agua (✓)
- Intensificación del Niño y la Niña, haciendo que las corrientes marítimas se alteren (✓)
- Haberle dado cuchillos a los niños con Internet (✓)
- Sociedades que apoyan, racional o irracionalmente, aquellas pre-condiciones que causan al final del día: Guerra, revueltas o discordias en el sistema (✓)
- Corrupción (✓)(✓)
- Problemas con el abastecimiento de alimentos y fertilizantes (✓)
- Moral Warriors de radicalismos de moda (✓)(✓)
- Desempleo (✓)
- Meaning Crisis (✓)
- Tráfico de humanos, especialmente infantes (✓)(✓)
- Recordar que todo lo objetivo, de toda esta lista (y los millones de puntos que faltan), emergió de la subjetividad humana, economía, política, geografía, complejidad... nuestra mentecilla es la que crea todo esto ANTES de que pase en la “realidad” o lo que eso signifique, a lo que voy es que Tenemos jodido el cerebro en nuestras culturas debido a cómo nos hemos conducido y una vez que entra a nuestro campo de consciencia y le damos tiempo de pensamiento diario… pues check (✓)
-----------
Ah, para más fácil, si no se sabe reconocer al mal eterno existente, que actúa sobre todo pues es
"nuestra" naturaleza (si no se combate), éste post de Scott Alexander y el video, que es lo mismo, lo describen excelentemente o, al menos, te lo aclara. De esto lo que me da miedo es que hay muchos que les tienes que decir "¡NO VEAS EL DEDO! ¡VE LO QUE SEÑALA EL DEDO! : ¡LA LUNA!" y de todas formas te van a decir "sí, ya veo... ¡la lúnula!, yo también teeeengooooo".
(Antes de esto si se puede leer historia de la economía, ¡qué mejor!)
Love (forgiveness) and charity.
July 10, 2023
If you’re at all interested in how our current system of capitalism is no good, this is a pretty good book. Peter Turchin has been researching this stuff for years, and basically, he has a theory that history sort of repeats itself and the overproduction of ultra-wealthy elites is no good. Over time, the overproduction of elites creates anger and hostility in the lower classes, but then, even upper-class people start to realize they’re getting screwed over, and then they want to burn down society as well. This ends up leading to revolutions and all sorts of bad things.
My issues with the book are once again personal ones. I’m not a major fan of history books, and there’s an insane amount of history in here. Also, in the beginning, Turchin states that he’ll touch on other countries slightly but not much. I’d say the majority of the book is the history of how this has happened in other countries outside of the United States.
It also felt like at the beginning of the book, Turchin put a lot of effort into making the book digestible for the average reader. He did a great job with that, but then it changes about halfway through. As the book progresses, it gets into a lot more academic language that the average person won’t be a fan of.
Overall, it’s a decent book. I think it could have been a bit shorter as it just kind of starts giving more examples of the same. The book then wraps up nicely with some potential solutions.
My issues with the book are once again personal ones. I’m not a major fan of history books, and there’s an insane amount of history in here. Also, in the beginning, Turchin states that he’ll touch on other countries slightly but not much. I’d say the majority of the book is the history of how this has happened in other countries outside of the United States.
It also felt like at the beginning of the book, Turchin put a lot of effort into making the book digestible for the average reader. He did a great job with that, but then it changes about halfway through. As the book progresses, it gets into a lot more academic language that the average person won’t be a fan of.
Overall, it’s a decent book. I think it could have been a bit shorter as it just kind of starts giving more examples of the same. The book then wraps up nicely with some potential solutions.
August 19, 2023
Finished this a few weeks ago, but didnt want to post my review until it went live elsewhere first.
While I remain skeptical about just how positivistic you can make the humanities, Turchin does some of the best and most convincing work in this regard. It also jives very well with my own observations as someone who has been studying world history on the macro scale since I was a teen.
See my full review here:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/...
While I remain skeptical about just how positivistic you can make the humanities, Turchin does some of the best and most convincing work in this regard. It also jives very well with my own observations as someone who has been studying world history on the macro scale since I was a teen.
See my full review here:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/...
June 17, 2023
Interesting historical analysis
I enjoyed it, thought it was academically rigorous and made a lot of sense (as a member of the over produced elites alluded to in the book!)
I enjoyed it, thought it was academically rigorous and made a lot of sense (as a member of the over produced elites alluded to in the book!)
July 13, 2023
End Times, Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
Peter Turchin, 2023
For those of us who have experienced and been cognizant of the political climate of the last five decades, we have witnessed profound societal and political changes some of an alarming nature. Starting with the Reagon revolution of the 1980’s we have seen the political power and economic landscape tilt away from the vast majority of Americans in favor of the elite 1% on the income scale. Tax rates and policies have bestowed huge generosity towards this elite group to the effect of doubling the 1%’s share of the GDP from 10 to over 20%. Top tax rates cut from 70% to 35%, billionaire hedge fund manager’s marginal tax rates reduced to less than that of their secretaries, corporate tax rates cut in half. At the same time and coinciding with the decline of unions from over 30 % of the workforce to 7%, worker’s wages as a share of GDP are lower now than they were in the 1960’s. With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling huge dark money has been injected into the political system corrupting and tilting it in favor of the interests of the 1%. Corporate control of the media has skewed some large influential media empires into mouthpieces of the rich. Peter Turchin, project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and originator of scientific study of history called Cliodynamics, has been studying the historical causes of political unrest and revolutions. In 2010, based on his research, predicted in 2020 the United Staes would be entering a period of profound political disruption and violence. What did he see in his historical research and in his observation of US political dysfunction that led him to this prescient conclusion? That is the subject of his new book.
Throughout history it seems two factors seem to be always present in political unrest, violence, and revolutions; lower and middle class immiseration and the expansion of the elite class where the increasing number of aspirants to higher positions exceeds the number of positions available. He cites example after example of what he calls the wealth pump where the proportion of a societies GDP is shifted from the population at large usually through the evisceration of wages of the working class. Elites as they expand, are propelled into increasingly bitter and destructive competition to secure positions of power. In the US:“The flood of wealth from the working classes to the economic elites ballooned their numbers and resulted in elite overproduction, bringing increasing intra-elite competition and conflict which started to undermine the unity and cohesion of the ruling coalition….. the economic leaders turned less moderate and less willing to contribute to the common good, which became a significant source of the current crisis of American democracy and a major cause of the predicament in which twenty-first-century United States finds itself.”
His synapsis at the end of the book captures our political situation in bleak reality: “The United States successfully shut down the wealth pump during the progressive era/ New Deal but then allowed self-interested elites to turn it back on in the 1970’s…… One clear and obvious sign is that after a long period of income and wealth compression during most of the twentieth century, economic inequality has begun growing again within Western democracies. Western Europe also suffers from an increasingly acute problem of overproduction of youth with advanced degrees. Another worrying sign has been the spread of neo-classical market fundamentalism, promoted by influential international publications, such as the economist, and by international organizations dominated by the US such as the International Monetary Fund. An even more worrying development in Western democracies is the transition from class-based party systems to multi-elite party systems….. the Democratic party, a party of the working class during the New Deal, became by 2000 the party of the credentialed 10 percent. The rival party, the Republican Party, primarily served the wealthy 1%, leaving the 90% out in the cold…. When political parties abandon the working classes, this amounts to a major shift in how social power is distributed within society. Ultimately it is this balance of power that determines whether the selfish elites are allowed to turn on the wealth pump. What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad way) of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats. Ideology may be the softest, gentlest form of power, but it is the key one in democratic societies. The plutocrats can use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and to handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their interests. Cruder forms of power, such as swaying elections and lobbying politicians are also quite effective in promoting the political agendas of the rich. Finally, just as in war, money is the most important fuel powering organizations. Naked enthusiasm is better than just money, although money plus enthusiasm is better than just money. The plutocrats can afford (literally) to plan and implement their plans for the long term.
So in mid-2023 we find ourselves in an increasingly unstable and dangerous political situation, just the situation that Peter Turchin predicted over 13 years ago. The anger and resentment of the working and middleclass is there to be exploited by a skillful demigod who promises retribution and retaliation on those seen to have exploited and disabused the uneducated as “baskets of deplorables”. It is obvious that the current situation of extreme wealth inequality is not stable or sustainable. We are at a crossroads in history where we can go the autocratic route or the democratic route. In the early nineteen thirties, coming off the end of the gilded age of extreme wealth inequality of the 1920’s and the beginning of economic collapse in 1930, two paths were open before the country. We could have chosen the autocratic path such as happened in Germany or the path of increased redistribution of political power and income to the working and middle class in the New Deal. As Turchin states: “when selfish ruling classes run their societies into the ground, it is good to have alternatives – success stories. And it falls to us, the 99% to demand that our rulers act in ways that advance common interests. Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.” Can we?
This is a very comprehensive analysis which details political instabilities and revolutions from the Roman Empire onward through the Middle Ages to contemporary societies. I can only give in this synapsis a small bit of analysis presented regarding the current situation in the US. My take: a very relevant read now to understand our current political crisis. JACK
Peter Turchin, 2023
For those of us who have experienced and been cognizant of the political climate of the last five decades, we have witnessed profound societal and political changes some of an alarming nature. Starting with the Reagon revolution of the 1980’s we have seen the political power and economic landscape tilt away from the vast majority of Americans in favor of the elite 1% on the income scale. Tax rates and policies have bestowed huge generosity towards this elite group to the effect of doubling the 1%’s share of the GDP from 10 to over 20%. Top tax rates cut from 70% to 35%, billionaire hedge fund manager’s marginal tax rates reduced to less than that of their secretaries, corporate tax rates cut in half. At the same time and coinciding with the decline of unions from over 30 % of the workforce to 7%, worker’s wages as a share of GDP are lower now than they were in the 1960’s. With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling huge dark money has been injected into the political system corrupting and tilting it in favor of the interests of the 1%. Corporate control of the media has skewed some large influential media empires into mouthpieces of the rich. Peter Turchin, project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and originator of scientific study of history called Cliodynamics, has been studying the historical causes of political unrest and revolutions. In 2010, based on his research, predicted in 2020 the United Staes would be entering a period of profound political disruption and violence. What did he see in his historical research and in his observation of US political dysfunction that led him to this prescient conclusion? That is the subject of his new book.
Throughout history it seems two factors seem to be always present in political unrest, violence, and revolutions; lower and middle class immiseration and the expansion of the elite class where the increasing number of aspirants to higher positions exceeds the number of positions available. He cites example after example of what he calls the wealth pump where the proportion of a societies GDP is shifted from the population at large usually through the evisceration of wages of the working class. Elites as they expand, are propelled into increasingly bitter and destructive competition to secure positions of power. In the US:“The flood of wealth from the working classes to the economic elites ballooned their numbers and resulted in elite overproduction, bringing increasing intra-elite competition and conflict which started to undermine the unity and cohesion of the ruling coalition….. the economic leaders turned less moderate and less willing to contribute to the common good, which became a significant source of the current crisis of American democracy and a major cause of the predicament in which twenty-first-century United States finds itself.”
His synapsis at the end of the book captures our political situation in bleak reality: “The United States successfully shut down the wealth pump during the progressive era/ New Deal but then allowed self-interested elites to turn it back on in the 1970’s…… One clear and obvious sign is that after a long period of income and wealth compression during most of the twentieth century, economic inequality has begun growing again within Western democracies. Western Europe also suffers from an increasingly acute problem of overproduction of youth with advanced degrees. Another worrying sign has been the spread of neo-classical market fundamentalism, promoted by influential international publications, such as the economist, and by international organizations dominated by the US such as the International Monetary Fund. An even more worrying development in Western democracies is the transition from class-based party systems to multi-elite party systems….. the Democratic party, a party of the working class during the New Deal, became by 2000 the party of the credentialed 10 percent. The rival party, the Republican Party, primarily served the wealthy 1%, leaving the 90% out in the cold…. When political parties abandon the working classes, this amounts to a major shift in how social power is distributed within society. Ultimately it is this balance of power that determines whether the selfish elites are allowed to turn on the wealth pump. What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad way) of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats. Ideology may be the softest, gentlest form of power, but it is the key one in democratic societies. The plutocrats can use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and to handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their interests. Cruder forms of power, such as swaying elections and lobbying politicians are also quite effective in promoting the political agendas of the rich. Finally, just as in war, money is the most important fuel powering organizations. Naked enthusiasm is better than just money, although money plus enthusiasm is better than just money. The plutocrats can afford (literally) to plan and implement their plans for the long term.
So in mid-2023 we find ourselves in an increasingly unstable and dangerous political situation, just the situation that Peter Turchin predicted over 13 years ago. The anger and resentment of the working and middleclass is there to be exploited by a skillful demigod who promises retribution and retaliation on those seen to have exploited and disabused the uneducated as “baskets of deplorables”. It is obvious that the current situation of extreme wealth inequality is not stable or sustainable. We are at a crossroads in history where we can go the autocratic route or the democratic route. In the early nineteen thirties, coming off the end of the gilded age of extreme wealth inequality of the 1920’s and the beginning of economic collapse in 1930, two paths were open before the country. We could have chosen the autocratic path such as happened in Germany or the path of increased redistribution of political power and income to the working and middle class in the New Deal. As Turchin states: “when selfish ruling classes run their societies into the ground, it is good to have alternatives – success stories. And it falls to us, the 99% to demand that our rulers act in ways that advance common interests. Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.” Can we?
This is a very comprehensive analysis which details political instabilities and revolutions from the Roman Empire onward through the Middle Ages to contemporary societies. I can only give in this synapsis a small bit of analysis presented regarding the current situation in the US. My take: a very relevant read now to understand our current political crisis. JACK
December 27, 2023
Este es un libro extraño. Te agarra del pescuezo nada más empezar contándote con completa fascinación lo que en realidad no deja de ser más que el enésimo intento de alcanzar el sueño humano de predecir el futuro. Aunque, por supuesto, el autor, negará ante un tribunal buscar nada semejante.
Turchin se ha inventado la cliodinámica, una suerte de psicohistoria asimoviana que recoge enormes cantidades de datos de los sistemas políticos del pasado para hallar patrones repetidos una y otra vez. Y tiene pocas dudas de que vivimos en un momento de crisis cataclísmica donde la revuelta generalizada y, casi con seguridad, la guerra civil, parecen inminentes. La sobreproducción de élites y la pauperización del resto parecen llevarnos de cabeza el precipicio. Los síntomas, desde el populismo a la polarización pasando por la violencia política creciente son claros. Y las elecciones de EEUU en 2024 podrían ser el catalizador definitivo del desastre.
Todo esto el lector lo disfruta muchísimo, a veces escéptico, otras verdaderamente acojonado, siempre sin poder dejar de leer ni un minuto. Ahora, pequeñas ráfagas (como el discurso anti inmigración supuestamente desde una visión izquierdista o el lamentable punto de vista prorruso en torno a la invasión de Ucrania) generan algo más inquietante que una duda.
En cualquier caso, todo un librazo que te da una vuelta y media a la cabeza.
Turchin se ha inventado la cliodinámica, una suerte de psicohistoria asimoviana que recoge enormes cantidades de datos de los sistemas políticos del pasado para hallar patrones repetidos una y otra vez. Y tiene pocas dudas de que vivimos en un momento de crisis cataclísmica donde la revuelta generalizada y, casi con seguridad, la guerra civil, parecen inminentes. La sobreproducción de élites y la pauperización del resto parecen llevarnos de cabeza el precipicio. Los síntomas, desde el populismo a la polarización pasando por la violencia política creciente son claros. Y las elecciones de EEUU en 2024 podrían ser el catalizador definitivo del desastre.
Todo esto el lector lo disfruta muchísimo, a veces escéptico, otras verdaderamente acojonado, siempre sin poder dejar de leer ni un minuto. Ahora, pequeñas ráfagas (como el discurso anti inmigración supuestamente desde una visión izquierdista o el lamentable punto de vista prorruso en torno a la invasión de Ucrania) generan algo más inquietante que una duda.
En cualquier caso, todo un librazo que te da una vuelta y media a la cabeza.
February 17, 2024
El libro presenta una teoría interesante sobre el origen de las crisis en la sociedades. Estas serían recurrentes y cíclicas. Dependen fundamentalmente de la pauperización del pueblo (pérdida de riqueza relativa frente a la élite) y la sobreproducción de élites, es decir, la existencia de demasiados aspirantes a ella, cuando los cupos son limitados.
El autor nos presenta una teoría sociológica que toma en cuenta aspectos materiales y otros culturales. Tiene ciertos esbozos de una aspiración a cierta sociología científica, igual que Marx, y sin miedo a caer en los excesos de Comte. Creo que el mainstream del área es reacia a este tipo de teorías, así que me pareció interesante la propuesta.
En general el libro fluye rápido y presenta varios ejemplos. Lo que falla a mi gusto es la explicación de la teoría (la cliodinámica), pues en algunas partes vi ligeras contradicciones o imprecisiones. Me faltó que la presentación fuera más ordenada.
De creer la teoría del autor, y si queremos limitar las crisis sociales, deberíamos implementar medidas de redistribución de la riqueza regularmente, y sobretodo limitar los aspirantes frustrados a la élite, que se generan principalmente al tener demasiados universitarios que no tienen mercado laboral suficiente.
El autor nos presenta una teoría sociológica que toma en cuenta aspectos materiales y otros culturales. Tiene ciertos esbozos de una aspiración a cierta sociología científica, igual que Marx, y sin miedo a caer en los excesos de Comte. Creo que el mainstream del área es reacia a este tipo de teorías, así que me pareció interesante la propuesta.
En general el libro fluye rápido y presenta varios ejemplos. Lo que falla a mi gusto es la explicación de la teoría (la cliodinámica), pues en algunas partes vi ligeras contradicciones o imprecisiones. Me faltó que la presentación fuera más ordenada.
De creer la teoría del autor, y si queremos limitar las crisis sociales, deberíamos implementar medidas de redistribución de la riqueza regularmente, y sobretodo limitar los aspirantes frustrados a la élite, que se generan principalmente al tener demasiados universitarios que no tienen mercado laboral suficiente.
April 18, 2024
Apenas lo terminé de leer supe que se trataba de un must-read. Independientemente de si estas de acuerdo o no con la tesis central del libro, considero que propone una reformulación de una debate clásico en ciencias sociales. ¿Existen leyes históricas? El libro no formula una ley, prefiere hablar de oscilaciones. En la actualidad, es bastante extendida la enseñanza de las sociedades como casos particulares sin necesidad de comparación.
Sin embargo, no deberiamos dejarnos convencer solo por proponer algo distinto a lo que se enseña. Si hay algo que considero particularmente deshonesto es la crítica acrítica. Y eso es precisamente lo mejor del libro, me motiva a querer leer más e investigar sobre sus propuestas. Temas que antes no me llamaban la atención como la demografía, ahora me generan sumo interés.
Como punto final, si algún defecto tiene el libro, eso es la repetición de algunos temas en sus últimos dos capítulos. En fin, lectura muy recomendada.
Sin embargo, no deberiamos dejarnos convencer solo por proponer algo distinto a lo que se enseña. Si hay algo que considero particularmente deshonesto es la crítica acrítica. Y eso es precisamente lo mejor del libro, me motiva a querer leer más e investigar sobre sus propuestas. Temas que antes no me llamaban la atención como la demografía, ahora me generan sumo interés.
Como punto final, si algún defecto tiene el libro, eso es la repetición de algunos temas en sus últimos dos capítulos. En fin, lectura muy recomendada.
June 18, 2023
Great overall thesis, but what is the definition of an elite? And how are they overproduced? Feels like this book should be 1000 pages to support the breadth of arguments it aims for, and is limited by format.
August 16, 2023
Well written, but sometimes more about his research processes, but still - an important view of America today and the potential trajectories as related to historical precedent.
October 26, 2023
This felt like one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Fascinating approach, interesting conclusions. Captures into words that constant feeling of imminent collapse that we’ve all just grown to accept and makes you feel a little less insane by being able to understand it. I’ll be rereading this for a very long time.
November 16, 2023
An interesting book for sure. Somewhat complex in the details but easy to step away from the weeds and apply to the forest. That is: societies raise and fall depending on two key factors, (1) elite over production, and (2) popular immiseration. When wages are low and wealth is pushed up to the elite, societies tend to be more unstable and forces are applied to change them. These forces can be wars, revolts or a simple change in policies to increase wages to reduce the wealth pump. This “balance” is really difficult. When wagers are high and the wealth pump is turned off, society appears more stable. So the inequality that we are experiencing in the US today, November 2023, provides a volatile base from which to go forward. More and more articles about this subject are appearing in magazines, blogs and essays. It is easy to see how the US today is suffering from this: open borders push wages down and wealth to the elites. Populists on both sides of the political isle are fighting the elites. Who knows what will happen next.
I have been saying for a long time now: there are too many college degrees being produced for the marketplace. This is proven out by the concept of over production of elites, as stated in this book.
I have been saying for a long time now: there are too many college degrees being produced for the marketplace. This is proven out by the concept of over production of elites, as stated in this book.
April 19, 2024
Strange read. Basically, the author has developed a theory based on big amounts of data that predicts the most possible outcomes for certain countries. The author’s arguments are compelling but the theory seems a bit crude and I Iack the knowledge of history to assess whether certain facts have been omitted in developing the theory. That being said, it is an interesting read.
December 28, 2023
This book presents a grand theory of social instability (basically societal collapse, but the author dislikes that term) and how it arises and resolves. In short, the theory is that society produces too many "elites", which you can think of vaguely as upper classes. Elites consume more resources, so with more of them consuming, there is less for the commoners, increasing inequality and poverty. Since there is a surplus of elites, many of them are unemployed or underemployed, especially in certain occupations (lawyers are mentioned). They come to resent the system that left them with a worthless degree and a mountain of debt and get to organizing the increasingly frustrated poor.
It's a 5 star book, because the theory is compelling, probably testable, and relevant. Turchin's ideas are an unfamiliar (to me) lens through which to view history, and once I became familiar with it, from this and a previous book of his (War and Peace and War), it influenced my writing and my interpretation of the daily news headlines. You should read the book because of that, it's enjoyable to read and will become a classic of scientific literature. If his theories turn out to be wrong, they are wrong in an informative way that we will learn something in proving them wrong.
If I was rating the book on whether I think it's factual, I would give it maybe 3.5/5 stars. Cliodynamics is going to be a fruitful field of study, and Turchin's approach to it (I think he invented the term but there are now others working in the field) is worthy of more investigation, but I don't think anyone should make any policy decisions based on the theories in this book until they've been thoroughly tested. Here's questions I had, or things I thought were weaknesses in the theory, and just some random thoughts I had:
- I don't know what an "elite" is, or an aspiring elite. Am I one? What about a 23 year old in a band that plays in bars on the weekends and dreams of making it big, are they an aspiring elite? Turchin equates elite status with the top 1% wealthiest people, but then how are we overproducing them if it's always only going to be 1% of the population? This definition is not workable. We can use proxies, like law degrees, to count the number of elites, but without a strict definition we can cherry pick which proxies we want and prove anything. I do think he's onto something though, but I see a major obstacle in turning these ideas into a predictive science until you have a consistent definition of what an elite is, something that you can use across different societies and time periods. My suspicion is that this way of looking at society is outdated, particularly in 21st century America where class just means wealth. You can come up with a theory of inflation that attributes it to "too many rich people", but you will get better answers if you realize it is actually "too much money". Similarly, I think Turchin's theory can be refined to too much of something, which elites may have a lot of but anyone can have some of - ambition? I don't know.
- The rich are clearly getting richer, but I'm not convinced that the poor are getting poorer - the data shows increased (inflation-adjusted) incomes for all quintiles. There are blips, but in general the poor are getting richer too, just much slower. That also matches my own observations when I think of people I grew up with in upstate NY. The situation is improving at unfair rates, but it is improving at least a little bit for everyone. Turchin addresses this paradox with enough relevant data, such as decreasing life expectancy, that I'm again convinced he's probably onto something, but I'm not completely convinced yet because I can't reconcile it with the economic data. His best argument was the recent decline in life expectancy, but I read after the book was published that life expectancy is just now starting to rise again. I think this question will be resolved in the next few years when we see where the trends head over longer terms.
- The poor do *appear* to be getting poorer when you consider not inflation adjusted income, but the fact that they get an increasingly smaller piece of a (rapidly growing) pie, and this is what most people actually mean when they say the poor are getting poorer. Questions I kept asking while reading the book were: why should this be a problem? If your own life is getting better, why do you care that someone else's life is getting better faster? Why is inequality, per se, an issue, instead of just poverty itself? Is it just envy that's causing all the unhappiness? A feeling of unfairness? The data doesn't lie, and if rising inequality is causing economic frustration despite everyone getting richer, the theory can still succeed without resolving this by just saying it's an issue for psychology, but I think it points to another weakness in the theory, which is that it doesn't pay enough attention to the power of ideology. For example, the book mentions that it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy a home, but it neglects to mention that home ownership is not the financial slam dunk that most people think it is. Depending on where you live, you will either save money by renting, or save only a modest amount by owning. So if a difficulty in becoming a homeowner is one of the causes of popular immiseration, this is a self-inflicted wound over failure to achieve a symbolic status rather than any actual material lack. The effect may be just as real, but giving more attention to the power of ideology here suggests different remedies.
- Another instance of not giving enough attention to the power of ideology shows up when you consider that it's mostly white people being radicalized. So, even if incomes actually ARE falling, are the median and average incomes not still higher for white people? Then why are there more white than black people becoming radicalized? Turchin mentions treating ideologies as a "contagion" and I like that idea. I don't know if he discusses it more in his other books. I think some kind of ideological infection causing an irrational FEAR of possible poverty is much more responsible for trump than actual poverty.
- Objectivity in science is important, but going too far in your attempts to be objective can cause you to overlook relevant facts. I think Turchin does that here when he treats both sides of the conflicts in the US as overly equivalent. There are insights to be gleaned by taking that stance, and it is true that there are plenty of conspiracy theories and general buffoonery on the left, but American conservativism is currently *defined* by conspiracy and falsehood. When the side that is much more rapidly becoming radicalized believes that vaccines don't work and trump won the 2020 election, this suggests to me that a severe LACK of education is playing a larger role than too many advanced degrees.
- I wonder if there is a future in small scale cliodyanmics. Do the equations scale down so that they could be used, for examples, to see what happens in a company with too many managers? Or, I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone was making an independent movie, and it got so bad that there was a whole subgenre of independent films which were just about independent filmmakers. So, there were a lot of aspiring elites in the world of film. Is this fact somehow responsible for the low quality of movies we're seeing now, 25 years later?
- In any discussion of remedies (historical or future), Turchin seems to focus mostly on things that have reduced the number of excess elites, like war and purges, or less violently, with social programs like The New Deal. But, what about employing these elites? The whole issue is this musical chairs structure where there are more people than posts for them, but why can't we add more chairs and employ these people, putting their overeducation to use? By increasing science funding, for example? With some fields, like law, it's hard to figure out what to do with the excess practitioners, but if you can pass the bar exam you can probably be taught to do a lot of other things. Have societies ever escaped crisis this way, and if not, is there any reason not to try and be the first?
- I'm eager to see what we'll get when they feed all this cliodynamics data through some predictive AI model, will LLMs give better predictions than equations?
- Turchin avoids using the term "collapse", but it's implied on nearly every page that this instability he is studying is a bad thing, and I take that as an unspoken premise of the book. The current situation in the US is ominous, and I think bad things will happen that don't have to happen... but, he also mentions Lincoln as a revolutionary leader, equivalent in some respects to trump. I can accept the equivalency at that value-free, abstract level, but then it leads to the question, maybe sometimes societal instability or even collapse is good. The northern interests in the civil war may have had entirely selfish motives in their conflict with the south, and it may have involved all this risk and violence and instability, but the outcome was still the end of slavery and I'm glad it happened. If I were alive back then I would have been trying to encourage more instability. Turchin hints at this dilemma when mentioning that the 1950s had its downsides, but he only spends a paragraph on it and doesn't go far enough. I'd say the 1950s were awful and the instability of the 1960s that upset it was a largely positive thing. This continual process of instability and reconstruction may be how societies evolve and grow. Was the fall of Rome really a death, or was it a mitosis?
It's a 5 star book, because the theory is compelling, probably testable, and relevant. Turchin's ideas are an unfamiliar (to me) lens through which to view history, and once I became familiar with it, from this and a previous book of his (War and Peace and War), it influenced my writing and my interpretation of the daily news headlines. You should read the book because of that, it's enjoyable to read and will become a classic of scientific literature. If his theories turn out to be wrong, they are wrong in an informative way that we will learn something in proving them wrong.
If I was rating the book on whether I think it's factual, I would give it maybe 3.5/5 stars. Cliodynamics is going to be a fruitful field of study, and Turchin's approach to it (I think he invented the term but there are now others working in the field) is worthy of more investigation, but I don't think anyone should make any policy decisions based on the theories in this book until they've been thoroughly tested. Here's questions I had, or things I thought were weaknesses in the theory, and just some random thoughts I had:
- I don't know what an "elite" is, or an aspiring elite. Am I one? What about a 23 year old in a band that plays in bars on the weekends and dreams of making it big, are they an aspiring elite? Turchin equates elite status with the top 1% wealthiest people, but then how are we overproducing them if it's always only going to be 1% of the population? This definition is not workable. We can use proxies, like law degrees, to count the number of elites, but without a strict definition we can cherry pick which proxies we want and prove anything. I do think he's onto something though, but I see a major obstacle in turning these ideas into a predictive science until you have a consistent definition of what an elite is, something that you can use across different societies and time periods. My suspicion is that this way of looking at society is outdated, particularly in 21st century America where class just means wealth. You can come up with a theory of inflation that attributes it to "too many rich people", but you will get better answers if you realize it is actually "too much money". Similarly, I think Turchin's theory can be refined to too much of something, which elites may have a lot of but anyone can have some of - ambition? I don't know.
- The rich are clearly getting richer, but I'm not convinced that the poor are getting poorer - the data shows increased (inflation-adjusted) incomes for all quintiles. There are blips, but in general the poor are getting richer too, just much slower. That also matches my own observations when I think of people I grew up with in upstate NY. The situation is improving at unfair rates, but it is improving at least a little bit for everyone. Turchin addresses this paradox with enough relevant data, such as decreasing life expectancy, that I'm again convinced he's probably onto something, but I'm not completely convinced yet because I can't reconcile it with the economic data. His best argument was the recent decline in life expectancy, but I read after the book was published that life expectancy is just now starting to rise again. I think this question will be resolved in the next few years when we see where the trends head over longer terms.
- The poor do *appear* to be getting poorer when you consider not inflation adjusted income, but the fact that they get an increasingly smaller piece of a (rapidly growing) pie, and this is what most people actually mean when they say the poor are getting poorer. Questions I kept asking while reading the book were: why should this be a problem? If your own life is getting better, why do you care that someone else's life is getting better faster? Why is inequality, per se, an issue, instead of just poverty itself? Is it just envy that's causing all the unhappiness? A feeling of unfairness? The data doesn't lie, and if rising inequality is causing economic frustration despite everyone getting richer, the theory can still succeed without resolving this by just saying it's an issue for psychology, but I think it points to another weakness in the theory, which is that it doesn't pay enough attention to the power of ideology. For example, the book mentions that it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy a home, but it neglects to mention that home ownership is not the financial slam dunk that most people think it is. Depending on where you live, you will either save money by renting, or save only a modest amount by owning. So if a difficulty in becoming a homeowner is one of the causes of popular immiseration, this is a self-inflicted wound over failure to achieve a symbolic status rather than any actual material lack. The effect may be just as real, but giving more attention to the power of ideology here suggests different remedies.
- Another instance of not giving enough attention to the power of ideology shows up when you consider that it's mostly white people being radicalized. So, even if incomes actually ARE falling, are the median and average incomes not still higher for white people? Then why are there more white than black people becoming radicalized? Turchin mentions treating ideologies as a "contagion" and I like that idea. I don't know if he discusses it more in his other books. I think some kind of ideological infection causing an irrational FEAR of possible poverty is much more responsible for trump than actual poverty.
- Objectivity in science is important, but going too far in your attempts to be objective can cause you to overlook relevant facts. I think Turchin does that here when he treats both sides of the conflicts in the US as overly equivalent. There are insights to be gleaned by taking that stance, and it is true that there are plenty of conspiracy theories and general buffoonery on the left, but American conservativism is currently *defined* by conspiracy and falsehood. When the side that is much more rapidly becoming radicalized believes that vaccines don't work and trump won the 2020 election, this suggests to me that a severe LACK of education is playing a larger role than too many advanced degrees.
- I wonder if there is a future in small scale cliodyanmics. Do the equations scale down so that they could be used, for examples, to see what happens in a company with too many managers? Or, I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone was making an independent movie, and it got so bad that there was a whole subgenre of independent films which were just about independent filmmakers. So, there were a lot of aspiring elites in the world of film. Is this fact somehow responsible for the low quality of movies we're seeing now, 25 years later?
- In any discussion of remedies (historical or future), Turchin seems to focus mostly on things that have reduced the number of excess elites, like war and purges, or less violently, with social programs like The New Deal. But, what about employing these elites? The whole issue is this musical chairs structure where there are more people than posts for them, but why can't we add more chairs and employ these people, putting their overeducation to use? By increasing science funding, for example? With some fields, like law, it's hard to figure out what to do with the excess practitioners, but if you can pass the bar exam you can probably be taught to do a lot of other things. Have societies ever escaped crisis this way, and if not, is there any reason not to try and be the first?
- I'm eager to see what we'll get when they feed all this cliodynamics data through some predictive AI model, will LLMs give better predictions than equations?
- Turchin avoids using the term "collapse", but it's implied on nearly every page that this instability he is studying is a bad thing, and I take that as an unspoken premise of the book. The current situation in the US is ominous, and I think bad things will happen that don't have to happen... but, he also mentions Lincoln as a revolutionary leader, equivalent in some respects to trump. I can accept the equivalency at that value-free, abstract level, but then it leads to the question, maybe sometimes societal instability or even collapse is good. The northern interests in the civil war may have had entirely selfish motives in their conflict with the south, and it may have involved all this risk and violence and instability, but the outcome was still the end of slavery and I'm glad it happened. If I were alive back then I would have been trying to encourage more instability. Turchin hints at this dilemma when mentioning that the 1950s had its downsides, but he only spends a paragraph on it and doesn't go far enough. I'd say the 1950s were awful and the instability of the 1960s that upset it was a largely positive thing. This continual process of instability and reconstruction may be how societies evolve and grow. Was the fall of Rome really a death, or was it a mitosis?
July 2, 2023
Un libro excelente para comprender cómo las élites y las contraélites influyen en la dirección de las sociedades complejas mediante su sobreproducción y la pauperización popular que conlleva. Si el curso de Estados Unidos (y de sociedades similares) se mantiene constante, solo puedo emitir una expresión: F por Estados Unidos.
August 6, 2023
This was a worthwhile read. Turchin looks at history's structural drivers with an interesting technique. I don't agree with all of what he says, but he lays out a perspective from which to view and process events that certainly provides a robust analytical template.
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